This is from a Facebook post I made today. It seemed worthy of an independent post.
"Elite" universities are obsolete.
Education is the transfer of information, nothing more. It is no different from media and entertainment. Only the content differs, and the fact there will be a test at the end to validate the transfer.
Information is infinitely reproducible, and always has been, but the cost of reproduction has collapsed. That started with Gutenberg over 5 centuries ago, but was accelerated by the digitization and the Internet. The marginal cost of a digital copy is nearly zero.
Information is easily transmitted. Again, during the era of horses and sailing ships, transmission was slow. But since the telegraph, then the radio, later television, and now the Internet, the marginal cost of transmission of information is nearly zero.
The textbook industry is a racket (racket as is racketeering, as is RICO statute), but it has served to reproduce and transmit information. UC Berkeley's David Patterson's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" has been used by computer science students around the world for 30 years. Every MBA program has emulated the Harvard Case Method since the mid-1980s.
What makes an elite university "elite"? It is actually simple, and it is two things: One, they have huge endowments which allow them to hire the preeminent academics, originally for teaching, but today primarily for research; and two, the elite universities stratify and vet the top 1% of total high school graduates in the U.S. SAT and ACT tests are a reasonable proxy for general intelligence, and elite universities pull from 98th percentile and higher SATs. Most students going to an elite university come from elite high schools, and are in the top 5% or higher of those elite high schools. Going to an elite university doesn't make you "smart". You have to be smart to get in in the first place.
The "elite" universities are made elite by elite researchers and elite students, not by elite teaching or elite content.
The idea of traveling far from home to distant hallowed halls, to be verbally instructed and mentored by wise old sages, the sole custodians of knowledge, is obsolete.
I should probably add, while the elite universities can stratify and vet the top 1% of high school graduates based on objective academic credentials, their ability to stratify and vet beyond those are limited. Sure, they can look at extra-curricular and volunteer activities, along with letters of recommendation in an attempt to view the "whole person", but those are easily gamed. More easily than padding academics, improving academics through tutoring, and improving admission test scores through specialized preparation. Indeed, we saw in the recent scandal, most of the assistance was through fake sports, etc., and a lesser extent was outright cheating on admission tests.
What that means is graduates of elite universities are in no way our moral betters, any more that morality correlates to IQ or academic success. And this is probably the great failing of the elite universities. They make no attempt to impart or distill morality, unlike the charter of the military academies.
Imagine if Harvard added a freshman indoctrination on par with the military academies, putting the incoming class under intense physical and psychological pressure. Imagine if someone psychologically cracked, struck out at a classmate, or disrespected an authority figure they were shown the door.
That would make the "elite" universities elite.
Wednesday, July 08, 2020
Monday, May 11, 2020
We Have 90 Days
We Have 90 Days.
As of the beginning of May, many U.S. states are starting to allow a limited, partial, highly restricted reopening of some additional businesses shut down by various orders aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19. To my knowledge, no state is reopening schools now, but most have tentative plans to reopen around the normal start of the 2020-2021 academic year.
There is a real possibility of a “second wave” of COVID-19 infections in the fall. We have had roughly 90 days to gather information on the virus and the disease. The data suggest the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads dominantly indoors, and rarely outdoors. UV radiation, higher temperature, higher humidity, and fresh air all appear to reduce the duration the virus lives on surfaces. At the same time, indoor summer conditions (cooler, dryer air-conditioned air, lack of UV light, etc.) may increase conditions for transmission. Once typical fall weather drives people indoors, transmissions are likely to increase.
When that happens, how will various municipal and state governments react? We now know more. Children are less susceptible to the disease when infected. It appears transmission from young children to adults is very low. This argues for not closing day care facilities and elementary schools. We don’t have good data on the transmission from infected adolescents to adults. That means closing high schools might be necessary.
Schools will restart in early August. A wave of new infections may start in October. But the plan needs to be known as school restarts. That means we have roughly 90 days to get a plan together.
It is fair to say the nation’s teachers did yeoman’s work implementing a distance learning plan in almost no time this spring. It is equally fair to say this plan was marginal at best, highly dependent on the parents, and resulted in very different learning experiences for the poor vs. the privileged.
We have 90 days to fix this.
We have had roughly 60 days to gather information on what works and what does not work. We have had roughly 60 days to evaluate the current distance learning efforts. We have had 60 days to look in the mirror and admit the home schoolers had this figured out long ago, and we could learn a lot from them.
We have 90 days to come up with a better plan.
As I pointed out in my previous essay “The Model is the Problem”, the best comment I read on this was home schooler Bethany Mandel who pointed out home schoolers go through a transition from “home school” to “home education”. What she meant by this was a successful home schooler integrates normal home activities into the education of the home schooled child. The most common example is using baking to teach fractions.
We have 90 days to create a better plan than the current one. It we mistakenly congratulate ourselves on our “success” in the spring school closures, and assume any fall or winter school closures will simply be more of the same, we will be making a huge error. The same kids who took an educational hit will take another. The same kids who took an educational leap will take another.
As I noted before, the model for the 2020-2021 academic year for primary and secondary education needs to be a hybrid model—one that can shift quickly from on-campus to distance learning, and back again. It needs to be flexible to account for active, involved parents (tutored), minimally involved parents (proctored), and no parents in the house (latchkey). We need to think in terms of “evaluating progress” not just “testing”. This means more open book style tests, more essays, more reports, etc. A mistake would be to go primarily online multiple choice tests, but there is a place for those. The idea of going to semester long workbooks, rather than frequent assignments, is worth considering. More experience-based learning is needed. By incorporating this into the curriculum while on campus, students will know how to complete experience-based assignments. Given the greater knowledge we have of the virus, a fall/winter lockdown would likely allow for more outside activity.
The idea we have limited amount of time to reinvent our organization also applies to government bureaucracies and commercial businesses. There is a very real possibility of another round of restrictions before Black Friday. The ability of a restaurant to quickly reduce indoor service by increasing spacing, to shift to outdoor dining only, then to delivery and pickup only, and then quickly back, while maintaining customer loyalty is important. Same for retail flexing between 50% capacity, 25% capacity, and curbside only. On the government side, municipal and state government functions will need to be flexible. It was simply to say: “All drivers’ licenses expiration dates are extended 3 months.” It is much harder to service all expired drivers licenses over the last six months in only three months in the summer. “Internet First” has to become the model going forward. Cities and counties should have apps for handling things like utilities sign ups.
Remote access (laptops, VPNs, etc.) have to be the norm, not the exception for all white-collar workers. As I have said before, the model is the problem. Models like treating white-collar civil servants like they are hourly blue-collar workers, with time cards, etc. needs to change. Instead of the insanity of “comp time” to allow “9/80” and “8/80” schedules, and banning working during lunch, most need to be considered exempt workers, and provided much more flexibility in hours. Byzantine rules and high approvals for remote working need to be ended. When they can be tossed aside in an emergency, how important were they? And then there is the very real possibility due to an inability to work remotely, many civil servants were simply sitting home and getting paid for doing no work, while others with the ability to work remotely were doing the jobs of two or three civil servants.
The military is another consideration. While members of headquarters can do some jobs remotely, anyone working with classified information cannot. And the operational units of the military must continue to drill and exercise their military mission. The COVID-19 epidemic on the U.S.S. Roosevelt could have easily happened in an Army, Marine, or Air Force barracks. Identifying what training can be done “socially distanced”, and what cannot, is the first step of flexing between the two depending on the state of the pandemic. Can basic training be flexed to double capacity in the summer months, and significantly reduced capacity in the winter months? We don’t have 90 days to determine that. It needed to already be done.
Congress has not handled the challenges of the pandemic well. Cutting and running early from D.C. only to have to rush back looked bad. Why did they leave so soon in the first place? Early on, there were many proposals for remote voting by congress. Even when congress was back in session, and the pressure mounted to pass remote voting rules was strong, it was dismissed as being “impossible” to create a secure voting system. This is hard to imagine. Most federal employees have some kind of smart card based ID card (DOD CAC, DOJ PIV, etc.) which provides multi-factor authentication to computer networks and applications. These cards not only allow two-factor authentication with the ID card and a memorized passcode, they also can contain biometric information such as fingerprints. A laptop, a smart card reader, and an issued smart card ID card supporting multi-factor authentication, combined with a relatively way of communicating a vote is not impossible. It would be easily testable on the House and Senate floors. Again, now is the time to address this. Another lockdown in the fall, leading to complete congressional dysfunction just prior to the election would not benefit the politicians. And the idea of politicians saying there is no way to secure their congressional vote while demanding the people reelect them through mandatory vote by mail will be seen as what it is: hypocrisy.
Which brings me to my next point. Election Day is November 3rd, and we need to face the reality the election could take place during a lockdown. This means states with tougher absentee voting rules will need to act more aggressively. They will need to establish and communicate the integrity of their system. They may need to address restrictions that may not be feasible during a lockdown, such as multiple witness requirements. They will need to get ahead of that now, because if they relax those requirements by emergency decree shortly before the election, there will be a level of public opposition. Since Vietnam and Watergate, individual’s trust in authority and institutions has been steadily declining. Jonathan Haidt described a “collapse in trust” of college students in their faculties. These are both, on average, politically left cohorts, so this loss of trust cuts across ideologies. Societal loss of trust is tinder for a potential fire.
Everything must change. Primary and secondary education must change. Higher education must change. Municipal governments must change. Business must change. State governments must change. The federal government must change. Congress must change. They all have to change. If only a few change, and the majority does not, we will have stasis again. If flexibility does not increase, the only alternatives are “On” and “Off”. If there is another flare-up in late October, and we are faced with only “On” and “Off” in our portfolio of responses, there will be far more angst and unrest than we see today, and that will impact a November 3rd election.
Yes, this pandemic is a once in a century event, and it is temporary. It likely will be history by the 2021-2022 winter season. But the changes made to make education, regulatory and licensing bureaucracies, legislative branches, businesses, and other organizations more flexible and responsive will only pay benefits. The idea of a congress that can be both in session and in district could bring us back to the idea of a citizen legislature. The idea of federal bureaucrats working remotely makes the idea of distributing more of the bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. and into the states they serve more plausible. The idea of more distance learning in higher education may finally be the thing that reigns in out of control college costs. The idea of more remote work by companies makes smaller cities, especially in the industrial heartland more economically viable.
But for that to happen, we have to get to work now.
We have 90 days.
As of the beginning of May, many U.S. states are starting to allow a limited, partial, highly restricted reopening of some additional businesses shut down by various orders aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19. To my knowledge, no state is reopening schools now, but most have tentative plans to reopen around the normal start of the 2020-2021 academic year.
There is a real possibility of a “second wave” of COVID-19 infections in the fall. We have had roughly 90 days to gather information on the virus and the disease. The data suggest the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads dominantly indoors, and rarely outdoors. UV radiation, higher temperature, higher humidity, and fresh air all appear to reduce the duration the virus lives on surfaces. At the same time, indoor summer conditions (cooler, dryer air-conditioned air, lack of UV light, etc.) may increase conditions for transmission. Once typical fall weather drives people indoors, transmissions are likely to increase.
When that happens, how will various municipal and state governments react? We now know more. Children are less susceptible to the disease when infected. It appears transmission from young children to adults is very low. This argues for not closing day care facilities and elementary schools. We don’t have good data on the transmission from infected adolescents to adults. That means closing high schools might be necessary.
Schools will restart in early August. A wave of new infections may start in October. But the plan needs to be known as school restarts. That means we have roughly 90 days to get a plan together.
It is fair to say the nation’s teachers did yeoman’s work implementing a distance learning plan in almost no time this spring. It is equally fair to say this plan was marginal at best, highly dependent on the parents, and resulted in very different learning experiences for the poor vs. the privileged.
We have 90 days to fix this.
We have had roughly 60 days to gather information on what works and what does not work. We have had roughly 60 days to evaluate the current distance learning efforts. We have had 60 days to look in the mirror and admit the home schoolers had this figured out long ago, and we could learn a lot from them.
We have 90 days to come up with a better plan.
As I pointed out in my previous essay “The Model is the Problem”, the best comment I read on this was home schooler Bethany Mandel who pointed out home schoolers go through a transition from “home school” to “home education”. What she meant by this was a successful home schooler integrates normal home activities into the education of the home schooled child. The most common example is using baking to teach fractions.
We have 90 days to create a better plan than the current one. It we mistakenly congratulate ourselves on our “success” in the spring school closures, and assume any fall or winter school closures will simply be more of the same, we will be making a huge error. The same kids who took an educational hit will take another. The same kids who took an educational leap will take another.
As I noted before, the model for the 2020-2021 academic year for primary and secondary education needs to be a hybrid model—one that can shift quickly from on-campus to distance learning, and back again. It needs to be flexible to account for active, involved parents (tutored), minimally involved parents (proctored), and no parents in the house (latchkey). We need to think in terms of “evaluating progress” not just “testing”. This means more open book style tests, more essays, more reports, etc. A mistake would be to go primarily online multiple choice tests, but there is a place for those. The idea of going to semester long workbooks, rather than frequent assignments, is worth considering. More experience-based learning is needed. By incorporating this into the curriculum while on campus, students will know how to complete experience-based assignments. Given the greater knowledge we have of the virus, a fall/winter lockdown would likely allow for more outside activity.
The idea we have limited amount of time to reinvent our organization also applies to government bureaucracies and commercial businesses. There is a very real possibility of another round of restrictions before Black Friday. The ability of a restaurant to quickly reduce indoor service by increasing spacing, to shift to outdoor dining only, then to delivery and pickup only, and then quickly back, while maintaining customer loyalty is important. Same for retail flexing between 50% capacity, 25% capacity, and curbside only. On the government side, municipal and state government functions will need to be flexible. It was simply to say: “All drivers’ licenses expiration dates are extended 3 months.” It is much harder to service all expired drivers licenses over the last six months in only three months in the summer. “Internet First” has to become the model going forward. Cities and counties should have apps for handling things like utilities sign ups.
Remote access (laptops, VPNs, etc.) have to be the norm, not the exception for all white-collar workers. As I have said before, the model is the problem. Models like treating white-collar civil servants like they are hourly blue-collar workers, with time cards, etc. needs to change. Instead of the insanity of “comp time” to allow “9/80” and “8/80” schedules, and banning working during lunch, most need to be considered exempt workers, and provided much more flexibility in hours. Byzantine rules and high approvals for remote working need to be ended. When they can be tossed aside in an emergency, how important were they? And then there is the very real possibility due to an inability to work remotely, many civil servants were simply sitting home and getting paid for doing no work, while others with the ability to work remotely were doing the jobs of two or three civil servants.
The military is another consideration. While members of headquarters can do some jobs remotely, anyone working with classified information cannot. And the operational units of the military must continue to drill and exercise their military mission. The COVID-19 epidemic on the U.S.S. Roosevelt could have easily happened in an Army, Marine, or Air Force barracks. Identifying what training can be done “socially distanced”, and what cannot, is the first step of flexing between the two depending on the state of the pandemic. Can basic training be flexed to double capacity in the summer months, and significantly reduced capacity in the winter months? We don’t have 90 days to determine that. It needed to already be done.
Congress has not handled the challenges of the pandemic well. Cutting and running early from D.C. only to have to rush back looked bad. Why did they leave so soon in the first place? Early on, there were many proposals for remote voting by congress. Even when congress was back in session, and the pressure mounted to pass remote voting rules was strong, it was dismissed as being “impossible” to create a secure voting system. This is hard to imagine. Most federal employees have some kind of smart card based ID card (DOD CAC, DOJ PIV, etc.) which provides multi-factor authentication to computer networks and applications. These cards not only allow two-factor authentication with the ID card and a memorized passcode, they also can contain biometric information such as fingerprints. A laptop, a smart card reader, and an issued smart card ID card supporting multi-factor authentication, combined with a relatively way of communicating a vote is not impossible. It would be easily testable on the House and Senate floors. Again, now is the time to address this. Another lockdown in the fall, leading to complete congressional dysfunction just prior to the election would not benefit the politicians. And the idea of politicians saying there is no way to secure their congressional vote while demanding the people reelect them through mandatory vote by mail will be seen as what it is: hypocrisy.
Which brings me to my next point. Election Day is November 3rd, and we need to face the reality the election could take place during a lockdown. This means states with tougher absentee voting rules will need to act more aggressively. They will need to establish and communicate the integrity of their system. They may need to address restrictions that may not be feasible during a lockdown, such as multiple witness requirements. They will need to get ahead of that now, because if they relax those requirements by emergency decree shortly before the election, there will be a level of public opposition. Since Vietnam and Watergate, individual’s trust in authority and institutions has been steadily declining. Jonathan Haidt described a “collapse in trust” of college students in their faculties. These are both, on average, politically left cohorts, so this loss of trust cuts across ideologies. Societal loss of trust is tinder for a potential fire.
Everything must change. Primary and secondary education must change. Higher education must change. Municipal governments must change. Business must change. State governments must change. The federal government must change. Congress must change. They all have to change. If only a few change, and the majority does not, we will have stasis again. If flexibility does not increase, the only alternatives are “On” and “Off”. If there is another flare-up in late October, and we are faced with only “On” and “Off” in our portfolio of responses, there will be far more angst and unrest than we see today, and that will impact a November 3rd election.
Yes, this pandemic is a once in a century event, and it is temporary. It likely will be history by the 2021-2022 winter season. But the changes made to make education, regulatory and licensing bureaucracies, legislative branches, businesses, and other organizations more flexible and responsive will only pay benefits. The idea of a congress that can be both in session and in district could bring us back to the idea of a citizen legislature. The idea of federal bureaucrats working remotely makes the idea of distributing more of the bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. and into the states they serve more plausible. The idea of more distance learning in higher education may finally be the thing that reigns in out of control college costs. The idea of more remote work by companies makes smaller cities, especially in the industrial heartland more economically viable.
But for that to happen, we have to get to work now.
We have 90 days.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
The Model is the Problem.
[Editor's Note: This post will be a work in progress. I want to get it up now. Expect edits.]
Is the model the problem? Is the system the problem?
The only obvious answer is yes.
I am going to go out on a limb with this one. It applies to the other problems as well, such as the small business relief.
We are 20% into the 21st Century. But we are still operating the country on a model developed in the mid-1930s, and perfected during World War II. It is the mid-20th Century model of industrial economy bureaucracy. It may well have worked effectively back then. We were able to build the Hoover Dam, to win WWII, to emerge in the post-WWII era as the world's greatest power, and be a bulwark against the Soviet Union and imperial communism.
It gave us the Interstate Highway system. It got us to the moon. It gave us the Century Series Fighter Jets.
However, at some point, that model started failing. Probably in the 1970s.
By the mid-1980s the Space Shuttle exploded because of bureaucratic incompetence. Bridges collapsed. Emergency response was unresponsive. We had to allow dozens of aerospace companies merge into a duopoly and give one (Lockheed) the fighter franchise, and the new "cheap" F-35 costs more than the older, more expensive F-22, an airplane that took 27 years from initial contract to IOC. We are literally trapped by our own bureaucracy.
In the pandemic, the CDC and the FDA proved the biggest impediments to our response.
Maybe we have the wrong model for today?
I read a great book on the Apollo program by Charles Murray (better known for his controversial book, "The Bell Curve"). When I read it, reading about the early days of NASA, I felt like I was reading about Silicon Valley startups. For an early unmanned test of Mercury capsule, one of the administrators literally took a belt sander to the heat shield to make it fit on the booster.
My point? You cannot look to the past successes of government bureaucracies of the 1930s through 1960s and expect the same success today.
Our political model is also broken. During a time when tens of thousands of Americans are dead due to a pandemic, and tens of millions of Americans are unemployed due to government mandated closures, our politicians prefer to try to leverage the crisis for personal and party political gain, instead of working together. Revolutions have started over less.
But even when legislation is passed and money appropriated, we hear stories of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies getting “small business payments”, while sole proprietorships and LLCs struggle and wait.
Why? Why did the administration of this program spectacularly fail? In part it is in how the legislation was constructed. It is fair to say it was constructed in an incompetent fashion. The Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department clearly failed in administering the program.
But this is not the first time in this century such failures have occurred. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a., “The Stimulus Act”) also was littered with inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. President Obama promised “Shovel Ready” projects in 2009. Only a year later, Obama would state “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” In 2011, Obama would say “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” The failures of Solyndra and Abound Solar, who together received almost $1 billion in federal loans, both declared bankruptcy. In hindsight, their products were not viable. How did the bureaucracy fail to qualify these potential recipients?
Then you have to look at the disastrous response of the unemployment insurance system to the record levels of unemployment (over 25 million in three weeks).
The number of unemployment claims was not a surprise. They were expected. How did the bureaucracy fail to ask if state unemployment insurance programs were capable of the processing expected scale of claims?
Many argued for something more like a UBI. Just issue checks to everyone—fast. It would have been simpler to do this, and there could have been some nominal “claw back” tax so those who remained employed, and were making good money, would have the value of the check taxed away. I realize bumping up the higher tax brackets by a few percent would have caused howls of “raising taxes during a pandemic”, but courageous leaders could have explained it.
The point is, the traditional unemployment insurance is the old model. Managed by a bureaucracy. The concept of UBI is something that comes from the libertarian right and the technology left (who is also arguably libertarian-leaning). It is anti-bureaucracy by design. And it would have avoided the challenges with the state unemployment insurance systems.
My argument is the model is the problem. Industrial economy bureaucracies are architected for incremental adaptation. They are generally overbuilt for “peacetime”, because they are expected to surge in time of emergency. That is why they appear fat. The government bureaucracies follow the rules provided them, and rarely change. That is in large part why they appear ossified.
However, in the name of efficiency, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s (about twenty years after the bureaucracies started failing us), modern corporate management models were applied to government.
As a sidebar, it is important to note most large corporations operated on the industrial economy bureaucratic model as well, many before the New Deal Era of expanded government. The economy grew slowly, capital was scarce, and there was little need for large corporations to react to smaller, nimble competitors. Even after the Progressive Era trust-busting, the smaller remnants of the former monopolies often operated as regional monopolies. The companies which became the “Arsenal of Democracy” all were organized on the industrial economy bureaucratic model. There were exceptions, Higgins Industries was a very small company before it got the LCVP landing craft contract. But most heavy weapons and components were manufactured by the industrial giants.
In the 1970s, many of these industrial giants had near-death experiences as the economies of Europe and Japan had finally recovered to a point they could compete globally. Deming’s innovative management methods, ignored by the industrial economy bureaucracies in the U.S. took hold in Japan. By the 1980s, U.S. companies were desperate to improve, and adopted similar methods. The problem is you cannot adapt via piecemeal Deming’s methods onto the industrial economy bureaucracy model. You can do something totally new and different. You might be able to do some kind of hybrid model. But you cannot tinker at the edges. Cutting budgets, cutting inventories, etc. simply don’t work. If you have an emergency response bureaucracy whose job is to scale up and provide goods (think CDC’s Strategic National Stockpile), you can’t cut the staffing to all that is needed in peacetime and go to just-in-time inventory models. There might be a radically rethought model that could work and be more efficient, but you can’t adjust what you have.
So why did they? My guess is much of this has to do with federal employee unions. Unions are necessarily protectors of the status quo. Their job is to resist change, and as a side-effect, they resist innovation. Federal employee unions were threatened by modern management models, so they sought to keep the impact to incremental effects. Not complete redesigns of departments, but tolerating the 10% staffing cut here, the A-76 study outsourcing of a function there. We will give up that role to a contractor as long as experienced union members are protected and allowed to find new jobs.
There is another factor about public sector unions which must be considered. The era from 1933 to 1945, and beyond until 1960 was a model based on federal employees as public servants. There was a mentality of duty similar to the military. But after President Kennedy expanded the powers of federal employee unions, the reality is the loyalty shifted from serving the people to the union. This is similar to the trend seen in private sector unions in the 1960s, leading to more aggressive union behavior in the 1970s, followed by anti-union sentiment in the 1980s.
What we did is we took an outdated model and made it worse. The simple truth is the bureaucracy of 1955, if preserved and funded, and operated by a pre-1960 federal employee model, might have served us well.
But even increasing funding and staffing cannot fix the existing environment. I recall hearing a reporter talk about the increase in government workers in the post 9/11 era. This reporter started by stating prior to 9/11, a D.C. press pass allowed reporters to roam the halls of federal agencies. Post 9/11, considerable restrictions were put in place. When he did get into the federal agencies, he noted many more employees, many of whom did not seem busy at all. In other words, the post-Deming 1990s stripped bureaucracies at least featured busy, hardworking employees. But adding employees did not change anything. The new bureaucracies simply were throwing more bodies at the wrong model.
Only a different model can fix this. Only a reinvention can address this. Unfortunately, the 2001 Global Terrorism crisis, the 2009 financial crisis, and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis have proven unable to address this. Perhaps the 2020-2022 Economic Depression will. Trumps and Bidens and AOCs are not the answer. We may see something external to government form. The idea of a group of business leaders, perhaps including high profile figures like Mark Cuban and Peter Thiel, organizing and demanding a fundamental rethinking of government. A large enough organized effort would strike terror in the hearts of traditional politicians, much in the same way Ross Perot’s third party run in 1992 shook up politicians of both parties and got them focused on the debt and deficit.
But there is more. The industrial economy bureaucratic model also applied to education. The rise of the educational model is timed with the Second Industrial Revolution, around the turn of the 20th Century. That is when high schools (secondary education) was mainstreamed, to prepare people for industrial and white collar jobs. Little has changed in the primary and secondary education in a over century. There have been various experimental alternatives in education, but nothing has disrupted the industrial economy bureaucratic model of education.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused 100% primary and secondary public and private school closures throughout the country. Schools rapidly attempted to shift to a distance learning model with mixed results. The only students who were not disrupted were homeschooled students. And that is instructive.
Author and home school mother Bethany Mandel stated the mistake being made was the schools were forcing the students into “home schooling”, when home schoolers had learned the right approach was not home schooling but “home education”. The point Mandel was making is home and education have to be integrated for it to work. The example often put forth is using baking to teach fractions.
Much of the distance learning is focused on workbooks and exercises and limited to little testing. Grading for many students has moved to a pass/fail model, without letter grades. Some schools are simply planning to give all students As.
For some students, the tools for remote learning (computers, Internet access, etc.) are severely limited. Some students have no parent in the home, due to the parent being an essential service worker. Others have parents at home who are not able to adequately support the home schooling effort. In some school districts, a significant percentage of students have simply dropped off the radar.
We are at a point where two things are highly probable. Schools will return to session in the fall of 2020, and there will be a second wave of COVID-19 which will force another round of school closures.
The industrial economy bureaucratic model is likely to drive school systems to simply double-down. Buy more laptops. Maybe fund cellular hot spots. Try to do the same thing done in Spring of 2020 but a little better.
The correct answer is a new model. The obvious approach would be to bring leaders of traditional education together with leaders in the homes schooling community. Building a lesson plan for hybrid schooling, something that offers three alternatives to an individual lesson—a traditional distance learning with workbooks, and two alternative experiential lessons designed to fit most student needs, perhaps one for a student with a parent, and another for a student alone—would be a model that would be far more successful if another round of school closures was required. Yes, it is a lot of work, but the resources are there. And the time is available (we have all summer).
The simple truth is the hybrid model could work fine even in the classroom with no school closures. It would make learning more fun, and it would exercise the hybrid model.
Another round of school closings, with many students falling even further behind, may cause significant unrest among parents. New thinking is required. New models are required.
And this is where we are. We are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but we are still operating governments and education on a Second Industrial Revolution model, the industrial economy bureaucratic model—big, heavy, slow-moving, very slow changing, centralized structures. It is long obsolete, by about a half a century. It could have sustained for a decade or two, but It should have been replaced no later than the 1990s. It has been exposed. It will be replaced. But how soon, and through what process?
Is the model the problem? Is the system the problem?
The only obvious answer is yes.
I am going to go out on a limb with this one. It applies to the other problems as well, such as the small business relief.
We are 20% into the 21st Century. But we are still operating the country on a model developed in the mid-1930s, and perfected during World War II. It is the mid-20th Century model of industrial economy bureaucracy. It may well have worked effectively back then. We were able to build the Hoover Dam, to win WWII, to emerge in the post-WWII era as the world's greatest power, and be a bulwark against the Soviet Union and imperial communism.
It gave us the Interstate Highway system. It got us to the moon. It gave us the Century Series Fighter Jets.
However, at some point, that model started failing. Probably in the 1970s.
By the mid-1980s the Space Shuttle exploded because of bureaucratic incompetence. Bridges collapsed. Emergency response was unresponsive. We had to allow dozens of aerospace companies merge into a duopoly and give one (Lockheed) the fighter franchise, and the new "cheap" F-35 costs more than the older, more expensive F-22, an airplane that took 27 years from initial contract to IOC. We are literally trapped by our own bureaucracy.
In the pandemic, the CDC and the FDA proved the biggest impediments to our response.
Maybe we have the wrong model for today?
I read a great book on the Apollo program by Charles Murray (better known for his controversial book, "The Bell Curve"). When I read it, reading about the early days of NASA, I felt like I was reading about Silicon Valley startups. For an early unmanned test of Mercury capsule, one of the administrators literally took a belt sander to the heat shield to make it fit on the booster.
My point? You cannot look to the past successes of government bureaucracies of the 1930s through 1960s and expect the same success today.
Our political model is also broken. During a time when tens of thousands of Americans are dead due to a pandemic, and tens of millions of Americans are unemployed due to government mandated closures, our politicians prefer to try to leverage the crisis for personal and party political gain, instead of working together. Revolutions have started over less.
But even when legislation is passed and money appropriated, we hear stories of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies getting “small business payments”, while sole proprietorships and LLCs struggle and wait.
Why? Why did the administration of this program spectacularly fail? In part it is in how the legislation was constructed. It is fair to say it was constructed in an incompetent fashion. The Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department clearly failed in administering the program.
But this is not the first time in this century such failures have occurred. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a., “The Stimulus Act”) also was littered with inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. President Obama promised “Shovel Ready” projects in 2009. Only a year later, Obama would state “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” In 2011, Obama would say “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” The failures of Solyndra and Abound Solar, who together received almost $1 billion in federal loans, both declared bankruptcy. In hindsight, their products were not viable. How did the bureaucracy fail to qualify these potential recipients?
Then you have to look at the disastrous response of the unemployment insurance system to the record levels of unemployment (over 25 million in three weeks).
The number of unemployment claims was not a surprise. They were expected. How did the bureaucracy fail to ask if state unemployment insurance programs were capable of the processing expected scale of claims?
Many argued for something more like a UBI. Just issue checks to everyone—fast. It would have been simpler to do this, and there could have been some nominal “claw back” tax so those who remained employed, and were making good money, would have the value of the check taxed away. I realize bumping up the higher tax brackets by a few percent would have caused howls of “raising taxes during a pandemic”, but courageous leaders could have explained it.
The point is, the traditional unemployment insurance is the old model. Managed by a bureaucracy. The concept of UBI is something that comes from the libertarian right and the technology left (who is also arguably libertarian-leaning). It is anti-bureaucracy by design. And it would have avoided the challenges with the state unemployment insurance systems.
My argument is the model is the problem. Industrial economy bureaucracies are architected for incremental adaptation. They are generally overbuilt for “peacetime”, because they are expected to surge in time of emergency. That is why they appear fat. The government bureaucracies follow the rules provided them, and rarely change. That is in large part why they appear ossified.
However, in the name of efficiency, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s (about twenty years after the bureaucracies started failing us), modern corporate management models were applied to government.
As a sidebar, it is important to note most large corporations operated on the industrial economy bureaucratic model as well, many before the New Deal Era of expanded government. The economy grew slowly, capital was scarce, and there was little need for large corporations to react to smaller, nimble competitors. Even after the Progressive Era trust-busting, the smaller remnants of the former monopolies often operated as regional monopolies. The companies which became the “Arsenal of Democracy” all were organized on the industrial economy bureaucratic model. There were exceptions, Higgins Industries was a very small company before it got the LCVP landing craft contract. But most heavy weapons and components were manufactured by the industrial giants.
In the 1970s, many of these industrial giants had near-death experiences as the economies of Europe and Japan had finally recovered to a point they could compete globally. Deming’s innovative management methods, ignored by the industrial economy bureaucracies in the U.S. took hold in Japan. By the 1980s, U.S. companies were desperate to improve, and adopted similar methods. The problem is you cannot adapt via piecemeal Deming’s methods onto the industrial economy bureaucracy model. You can do something totally new and different. You might be able to do some kind of hybrid model. But you cannot tinker at the edges. Cutting budgets, cutting inventories, etc. simply don’t work. If you have an emergency response bureaucracy whose job is to scale up and provide goods (think CDC’s Strategic National Stockpile), you can’t cut the staffing to all that is needed in peacetime and go to just-in-time inventory models. There might be a radically rethought model that could work and be more efficient, but you can’t adjust what you have.
So why did they? My guess is much of this has to do with federal employee unions. Unions are necessarily protectors of the status quo. Their job is to resist change, and as a side-effect, they resist innovation. Federal employee unions were threatened by modern management models, so they sought to keep the impact to incremental effects. Not complete redesigns of departments, but tolerating the 10% staffing cut here, the A-76 study outsourcing of a function there. We will give up that role to a contractor as long as experienced union members are protected and allowed to find new jobs.
There is another factor about public sector unions which must be considered. The era from 1933 to 1945, and beyond until 1960 was a model based on federal employees as public servants. There was a mentality of duty similar to the military. But after President Kennedy expanded the powers of federal employee unions, the reality is the loyalty shifted from serving the people to the union. This is similar to the trend seen in private sector unions in the 1960s, leading to more aggressive union behavior in the 1970s, followed by anti-union sentiment in the 1980s.
What we did is we took an outdated model and made it worse. The simple truth is the bureaucracy of 1955, if preserved and funded, and operated by a pre-1960 federal employee model, might have served us well.
But even increasing funding and staffing cannot fix the existing environment. I recall hearing a reporter talk about the increase in government workers in the post 9/11 era. This reporter started by stating prior to 9/11, a D.C. press pass allowed reporters to roam the halls of federal agencies. Post 9/11, considerable restrictions were put in place. When he did get into the federal agencies, he noted many more employees, many of whom did not seem busy at all. In other words, the post-Deming 1990s stripped bureaucracies at least featured busy, hardworking employees. But adding employees did not change anything. The new bureaucracies simply were throwing more bodies at the wrong model.
Only a different model can fix this. Only a reinvention can address this. Unfortunately, the 2001 Global Terrorism crisis, the 2009 financial crisis, and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis have proven unable to address this. Perhaps the 2020-2022 Economic Depression will. Trumps and Bidens and AOCs are not the answer. We may see something external to government form. The idea of a group of business leaders, perhaps including high profile figures like Mark Cuban and Peter Thiel, organizing and demanding a fundamental rethinking of government. A large enough organized effort would strike terror in the hearts of traditional politicians, much in the same way Ross Perot’s third party run in 1992 shook up politicians of both parties and got them focused on the debt and deficit.
But there is more. The industrial economy bureaucratic model also applied to education. The rise of the educational model is timed with the Second Industrial Revolution, around the turn of the 20th Century. That is when high schools (secondary education) was mainstreamed, to prepare people for industrial and white collar jobs. Little has changed in the primary and secondary education in a over century. There have been various experimental alternatives in education, but nothing has disrupted the industrial economy bureaucratic model of education.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused 100% primary and secondary public and private school closures throughout the country. Schools rapidly attempted to shift to a distance learning model with mixed results. The only students who were not disrupted were homeschooled students. And that is instructive.
Author and home school mother Bethany Mandel stated the mistake being made was the schools were forcing the students into “home schooling”, when home schoolers had learned the right approach was not home schooling but “home education”. The point Mandel was making is home and education have to be integrated for it to work. The example often put forth is using baking to teach fractions.
Much of the distance learning is focused on workbooks and exercises and limited to little testing. Grading for many students has moved to a pass/fail model, without letter grades. Some schools are simply planning to give all students As.
For some students, the tools for remote learning (computers, Internet access, etc.) are severely limited. Some students have no parent in the home, due to the parent being an essential service worker. Others have parents at home who are not able to adequately support the home schooling effort. In some school districts, a significant percentage of students have simply dropped off the radar.
We are at a point where two things are highly probable. Schools will return to session in the fall of 2020, and there will be a second wave of COVID-19 which will force another round of school closures.
The industrial economy bureaucratic model is likely to drive school systems to simply double-down. Buy more laptops. Maybe fund cellular hot spots. Try to do the same thing done in Spring of 2020 but a little better.
The correct answer is a new model. The obvious approach would be to bring leaders of traditional education together with leaders in the homes schooling community. Building a lesson plan for hybrid schooling, something that offers three alternatives to an individual lesson—a traditional distance learning with workbooks, and two alternative experiential lessons designed to fit most student needs, perhaps one for a student with a parent, and another for a student alone—would be a model that would be far more successful if another round of school closures was required. Yes, it is a lot of work, but the resources are there. And the time is available (we have all summer).
The simple truth is the hybrid model could work fine even in the classroom with no school closures. It would make learning more fun, and it would exercise the hybrid model.
Another round of school closings, with many students falling even further behind, may cause significant unrest among parents. New thinking is required. New models are required.
And this is where we are. We are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but we are still operating governments and education on a Second Industrial Revolution model, the industrial economy bureaucratic model—big, heavy, slow-moving, very slow changing, centralized structures. It is long obsolete, by about a half a century. It could have sustained for a decade or two, but It should have been replaced no later than the 1990s. It has been exposed. It will be replaced. But how soon, and through what process?
Thursday, January 02, 2020
What will the 2020s hold?
Looking back on the 2010s as a busy adult, it is hard to see much change.
I started the decade with my first iPhone, an iPhone 3GS. I don't recall if I got that iPhone in 2009, or 2010, but it was somewhere around there. And I was a smart phone user since 2005, when I bought a Palm Treo, with a data plan, and enabled my corporate email (via IMAP) on the device. I even bought software to allow me to tether the phone (via its data sync cable) to my laptop. Prior to that, in 2003, I was using SMS text messages on my GSM phone to communicate internationally. At the end of the decade (literally the very end), I had an iPhone XR.
My work tools did not really change. I started the 2010s with a Macbook Pro, and ended with a newer Macbook Pro.
Microsoft Windows went from Windows 7 to Windows 10. My home PC did not change much, an old flat screen monitor died, so I bought a new one.
My primary home TV did not change. It is still the same 1080p Sony SXRD rear-projection I bought on Black Friday in 2006. My basement TV went from a 30-inch 1080i CRT to a large 1080p LCD (bought second-hand).
While I went through four iPhones in the 2010s, I have the same 80GB iPod Classic I won in a work contest in 2006, which I use for my car audio.
I bought a new car in early 2010 (a 2009 model year car), and drove it for most of the decade, replacing it in early 2018 with a used 2015 model year car. The old iPod integrates just fine with the newer vehicle.
What did change? The single biggest consumer change I saw was the end of traditional media. Let me unpack this.
I started the decade still a member of the Air Force Reserve. As a flier in the Air Force, I had to carry considerable paper manuals. Most of these were published in PDF format, but we had to carry hard paper copies. I was curious about e-reader technology, and tested Air Force PDFs on the Sony Reader, which supported PDFs. Unfortunately, the resolution of E Ink e-readers was not good enough to render an 8-1/2 x 11 inch PDF page filled with small font text. However, in 2011 I purchased an iPad, and I found the iPad did render PDFs adequately. A couple of years later, the Air Force standardized on the iPad 2 as its Electronic Flight Bag. A single iPad replaced several large binders. While e-readers have had mixed success when compared to a handful of personal books, clearly they have an advantage for reference libraries.
The second example is when we purchased a minivan in late 2014 in anticipation of the birth of our second child. My manager at work told me: "Don't get the DVD player option. It is not worth the additional $7,000. Instead, go on Amazon on Black Friday and buy two cheap Android tablets. And sign up for their free kid app of the week." So for less than $100 for two tablets, and another $100 or so for headphones, cases, and car mounts, and another $50 for DVD ripping software, each child can watch what they want to watch. And now play games as well.
Obviously, the 2010s were the decade of Netflix, where Netflix's original DVD based business faded into irrelevance, and its nascent streaming service became an industry changing phenomenon.
Audio went through more changes. From the idea of digital downloads replacing traditional CD sales, to the emergence of streaming and the end of stand-alone MP3 players. Certainly, the smart phone played a role in this transition, as did smart speakers.
We went from renting DVDs to video streaming, and from buying CDs to downloading digital music to dedicated MP3 players which docked to speakers for the home, to audio streaming to smart phones and smart speakers. Media is all but dead.
The second most significant consumer phenomenon of the 2010s were "ridesharing" services Uber and Lyft. These services simply were not possible prior to the rise of the smartphone, and were the most disruptive business of the decade.
The third major consumer trend was the decline of retail, a.k.a., the "retail apocalypse". Everywhere during the 2010s one could find abandoned storefronts. This was not a new trend, as the decline of malls started in the 1990s, but a second wave started in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Specialty stores were obsoleted by online retailers, causing brands such as Toys "R" Us, Borders Books, and Payless ShoeSource to close, but also department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney to shrink their presence considerably. This trend is so significant, most cities are developing plans to deal with declining retail centers.
In the business area, the mainstream adoption of cloud computing was the biggest trend, followed by the mainstream embracing of mobile technology. Cloud computing officially started just prior to the 2010s decade, as Amazon Web Services EC2 came out of beta in late 2008. By mid-decade, mainstream adoption had started, and by late in the decade, most organizations were adopting cloud computing. In that time, the concepts of IaaS and PaaS had been refined into industries of their own. Also, software as a service (SaaS) was mainstreamed during the 2010s, with Salesforce and Microsoft's Office 365 driving a large portion of that segment. The decade started with significant on-premises infrastructure refreshes, driven by Intel's significantly improved Nehalem processor, the rationalization to x86 as the defacto instruction set architecture, the emergence of Linux as a viable alternative to UNIX, Windows Server 2008 as robust enterprise grade version of the Windows NT line, and the widespread use of 10Gb Ethernet networking. The decade ended with many large organizations getting completely out of the data center business, keeping what was required to be capitalized, owned, and self-managed in colocation facilities, and pushing everything else to opex SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS platforms.
The second biggest trend was the embracing of mobile. As Apple with its iPhone and the Google Android platform became a defacto mobile duopoly, and as smartphone penetration increased, a similar push to the late 1990s and early 2000s for businesses to get on the web emerged in the 2010s with mobile. Banking apps replaced ATMs, and airline apps replaced kiosks. Even ordering coffee at Starbucks was accelerated via mobile apps. While mobile apps are gimicky for some businesses, they are useful for many others, and critical for a few. And while most use cases for mobile were customer self-service, some businesses leveraged mobile for their own employees. Chick-fil-A's use of tablets to take orders and payments in the drive through during peak hours, airline flight attendants using mobile devices to process payments in flight, and of course products like Square, who allowed any independent business with a mobile phone to process credit card payments, and services like Uber and Lyft which are built entirely around the mobile phone ecosystem of location services and payment processing.
So what will be the trends for the next ten years? I really can't predict the consumer side of things. After all, I have a 13 year old rear projection TV, and just replaced a 2014 model year iPhone with a 2018 model. I bought a 2015 model year car about two years ago and intend to drive it as long as I can. I was a later adopter of Netflix streaming, finally joined Amazon Prime in 2019, but did subscribe to Disney+ within weeks of its launch.
My first prediction would be streaming surpasses broadcast and cable/satellite. Some channels will likely die off and fade away. Every media company will offer a streaming platform. People will expect an "all you can eat" model from the streaming providers, and there will be a war among the providers as to who can provide the most content. I also expect more ad supported "freemium" models to emerge. Related to this, I expect to see more audio streaming. Ad supported streaming has a strong potential because internet advertising offers the highest level of targeting and customization, which is something broadcast is not capable of providing. Streaming also offers the potential for interactivity, so the idea of interactive television could finally become a reality, with the viewer able to choose from different content rated version, and select from multiple story arcs. The other likelihood is, with all of the new streaming services, and the competition between them, Netflix's market cap will come down to Earth in the decade of the 2020s.
My second prediction is some autonomous vehicles will become mainstream by the end of the decade. What form I do not know. It may be limited to some kinds of minibuses on fixed routes in dedicated lanes, or it may be Level 4 or 5 autonomous automobiles. If Level 4 or 5 autonomous passenger vehicles become mainstream by the middle of the decade, Uber and Lyft will survive and likely thrive. If autonomous passenger vehicles do not become mainstream by the end of the decade, Uber and Lyft will disappear in current form. What is important is even if automated vehicles are limited to certain lanes, the idea of an autonomous minivan carpool-like service would be disruptive compared to the alternative of less frequent city buses. I think the significant thing to consider is, automated vehicles are likely to first appear in a form we are not expecting. Perhaps automated Bus Rapid Transit in places without existing mass transit (or mass transit driver unions).
In the business space I occupy, IT, I have better ideas, simply because I get exposed to my employer's roadmaps and hear about the strategic IT plans of customers.
My first predicted trend is edge computing. The push to the cloud will over-reach, and the overreach will be first seen where low latency and high bandwidth are needed. This will drive edge computing, if for no other purpose than to process and compress local data sets before uploading them to the cloud.
The best analogy for edge computing are content delivery networks (CDNs) today. If one looks at the history of CDNs, they originally were created to deal with the limited bandwidth of the internet, and limited computing power of internet servers. The appeal of CDNs in the era of the early dial-up internet faded as broadband penetration increased, but they would become critical again with the rise of downlodable and streaming media.
I mentioned Netflix and the rise of streaming media replacing traditional DVDs and CDs. What makes Netflix unique is its content delivery network, Open Connect. Some people love to point out Netflix was an early and aggressive adopter of Amazon Web Services. But when you watch a show on Netflix, it is not streaming from AWS, or from AWS' content delivery network, but from Netflix's own CDN. Netflix negotiated with ISPs to place their CDN appliances in the ISP's facilities. In most cases, this means the local telephone exchange facility for DSL based services, and the cable head-end for cable modem based services. This means Netflix is only streaming over the proverbial "last mile" of the Internet. Programs are pushed out to the Netflix Open Connect appliances ahead of availability. This is why when a new season of a show drops, millions of people can binge watch it with no slowdown of the Internet.
At the end of the 2010 decade, Disney launched Disney+. Prior to launching Disney+, Disney had to contract with existing CDN providers to ensure they could support the expected customer base. While the specifics are confidential, it is speculated Disney contracted with many CDN providers to ensure they had content as close as possible to their customers.
Video streaming providers and content delivery networks provide an important archetype for the future of edge computing. In additional to content delivery networks, there will need to be compute delivery networks.
Given today's Internet bandwidth, CDNs provide more value as a latency reducer. The latency for a web page, or simple streaming videos can easily be measured in the tens of milliseconds. However, edge computing will likely require sub 10 millisecond latency, and perhaps sub 5 millisecond latency. It will not be possible to simply locate compute resources in the same facility as existing CDNs.
It might be an ideal use case for existing local data centers, such as colocation facilities and existing corporate data centers. Alternatively, edge compute networks could be built in conjunction with 5G network facilities. 5G and edge compute facilities might be to the 2020s what "cloud plus mobile" was for the 2010s. 5G's limited broadcast distance will require many facilities. These facilities will connect into backhaul fiber networks. These new fiber networks will be installed throughout urban and suburban areas. It would be easy to connect an edge compute network facility to the 5G backhaul network. We have ten years to build this out a combined 5G and edge computing infrastructure, so I do expect it to look new and different, not bolted on.
My second prediction is AI goes mainstream. There was a lot of noise about AI in the last decade, peaking in 2018. Hype was bracketed with warnings of another "AI Winter". NVIDIA's market cap ran up to an incredible high, only to lose half its value. Companies bid up to seven figures for newly minted data scientist PhDs. But not much was visibly produced by AI. Most if it was invisible, things like fraud detection. That which was visible was not promising: people killed by self-driving automobiles, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, disturbing deepfakes, etc.
Part of the problem is we are still in the early days of AI. However, Moore's Law continues, academic efforts around machine learning and deep learning have expanded, software continues to improve, and companies are becoming more experienced in AI, what it is good for, and what it is not currently good for. This will lead to a rationalization, a focusing, which will produce usable results. Many of these uses cases will be simpler than the hype of the last decade.
The other thing which is likely to happen, which has not happened yet, is the commercialization of AI services. Today, each potential user of AI has to build their own AI environment. Sure, they can leverage cloud providers for the GPU infrastructure, and they leverage the open source tools, but they have to employ data scientists to build the training models, prepare the data, train the models, test the inference, etc. The idea of a third-party AI organization specializing in particular use cases, such as retail loss prevention, coming in and doing a complete AI based solution from data identification to data optimization to training to implementation of a final product is yet to be mainstream. Once it is, we will see more of deployment of AI. I expect data scientists employed by large retailers and large banks to create startups focused on implementing AI solutions.
The last IT related prediction I will make for the next decade is the idea of "everything as a service". The public cloud providers have changed the way enterprise IT customers consume resources and services. Many customers never implemented significant charge-back or show-back mechanisms to measure the cost of providing services. The idea of pay for use on premises IT was a feature of the mainframe and has been explored for decades in the open systems space. AWS's on-premise Outposts platform can be consumed either in an opex or capex model. I have seen some customers push back on opex models (software subscriptions) in favor of capex, and I have to wonder if it may be in part due to public cloud and SaaS opex expenditures consuming their opex budget, leaving IT with only capex remaining. If this is true, I expect budgets will evolve over time to a more opex heavy model. If some customers prefer opex models, and some capex models, this means vendors must provide both. I think we will see this with both software and hardware.
Regardless, I expect we will see more change in the next ten years than we saw in the last ten years. The pace of change of technology is accelerating. It is hard to notice because we are conditioned to the current time, and we are conditioned to change, so we only see change in retrospective.
I started the decade with my first iPhone, an iPhone 3GS. I don't recall if I got that iPhone in 2009, or 2010, but it was somewhere around there. And I was a smart phone user since 2005, when I bought a Palm Treo, with a data plan, and enabled my corporate email (via IMAP) on the device. I even bought software to allow me to tether the phone (via its data sync cable) to my laptop. Prior to that, in 2003, I was using SMS text messages on my GSM phone to communicate internationally. At the end of the decade (literally the very end), I had an iPhone XR.
My work tools did not really change. I started the 2010s with a Macbook Pro, and ended with a newer Macbook Pro.
Microsoft Windows went from Windows 7 to Windows 10. My home PC did not change much, an old flat screen monitor died, so I bought a new one.
My primary home TV did not change. It is still the same 1080p Sony SXRD rear-projection I bought on Black Friday in 2006. My basement TV went from a 30-inch 1080i CRT to a large 1080p LCD (bought second-hand).
While I went through four iPhones in the 2010s, I have the same 80GB iPod Classic I won in a work contest in 2006, which I use for my car audio.
I bought a new car in early 2010 (a 2009 model year car), and drove it for most of the decade, replacing it in early 2018 with a used 2015 model year car. The old iPod integrates just fine with the newer vehicle.
What did change? The single biggest consumer change I saw was the end of traditional media. Let me unpack this.
I started the decade still a member of the Air Force Reserve. As a flier in the Air Force, I had to carry considerable paper manuals. Most of these were published in PDF format, but we had to carry hard paper copies. I was curious about e-reader technology, and tested Air Force PDFs on the Sony Reader, which supported PDFs. Unfortunately, the resolution of E Ink e-readers was not good enough to render an 8-1/2 x 11 inch PDF page filled with small font text. However, in 2011 I purchased an iPad, and I found the iPad did render PDFs adequately. A couple of years later, the Air Force standardized on the iPad 2 as its Electronic Flight Bag. A single iPad replaced several large binders. While e-readers have had mixed success when compared to a handful of personal books, clearly they have an advantage for reference libraries.
The second example is when we purchased a minivan in late 2014 in anticipation of the birth of our second child. My manager at work told me: "Don't get the DVD player option. It is not worth the additional $7,000. Instead, go on Amazon on Black Friday and buy two cheap Android tablets. And sign up for their free kid app of the week." So for less than $100 for two tablets, and another $100 or so for headphones, cases, and car mounts, and another $50 for DVD ripping software, each child can watch what they want to watch. And now play games as well.
Obviously, the 2010s were the decade of Netflix, where Netflix's original DVD based business faded into irrelevance, and its nascent streaming service became an industry changing phenomenon.
Audio went through more changes. From the idea of digital downloads replacing traditional CD sales, to the emergence of streaming and the end of stand-alone MP3 players. Certainly, the smart phone played a role in this transition, as did smart speakers.
We went from renting DVDs to video streaming, and from buying CDs to downloading digital music to dedicated MP3 players which docked to speakers for the home, to audio streaming to smart phones and smart speakers. Media is all but dead.
The second most significant consumer phenomenon of the 2010s were "ridesharing" services Uber and Lyft. These services simply were not possible prior to the rise of the smartphone, and were the most disruptive business of the decade.
The third major consumer trend was the decline of retail, a.k.a., the "retail apocalypse". Everywhere during the 2010s one could find abandoned storefronts. This was not a new trend, as the decline of malls started in the 1990s, but a second wave started in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Specialty stores were obsoleted by online retailers, causing brands such as Toys "R" Us, Borders Books, and Payless ShoeSource to close, but also department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney to shrink their presence considerably. This trend is so significant, most cities are developing plans to deal with declining retail centers.
In the business area, the mainstream adoption of cloud computing was the biggest trend, followed by the mainstream embracing of mobile technology. Cloud computing officially started just prior to the 2010s decade, as Amazon Web Services EC2 came out of beta in late 2008. By mid-decade, mainstream adoption had started, and by late in the decade, most organizations were adopting cloud computing. In that time, the concepts of IaaS and PaaS had been refined into industries of their own. Also, software as a service (SaaS) was mainstreamed during the 2010s, with Salesforce and Microsoft's Office 365 driving a large portion of that segment. The decade started with significant on-premises infrastructure refreshes, driven by Intel's significantly improved Nehalem processor, the rationalization to x86 as the defacto instruction set architecture, the emergence of Linux as a viable alternative to UNIX, Windows Server 2008 as robust enterprise grade version of the Windows NT line, and the widespread use of 10Gb Ethernet networking. The decade ended with many large organizations getting completely out of the data center business, keeping what was required to be capitalized, owned, and self-managed in colocation facilities, and pushing everything else to opex SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS platforms.
The second biggest trend was the embracing of mobile. As Apple with its iPhone and the Google Android platform became a defacto mobile duopoly, and as smartphone penetration increased, a similar push to the late 1990s and early 2000s for businesses to get on the web emerged in the 2010s with mobile. Banking apps replaced ATMs, and airline apps replaced kiosks. Even ordering coffee at Starbucks was accelerated via mobile apps. While mobile apps are gimicky for some businesses, they are useful for many others, and critical for a few. And while most use cases for mobile were customer self-service, some businesses leveraged mobile for their own employees. Chick-fil-A's use of tablets to take orders and payments in the drive through during peak hours, airline flight attendants using mobile devices to process payments in flight, and of course products like Square, who allowed any independent business with a mobile phone to process credit card payments, and services like Uber and Lyft which are built entirely around the mobile phone ecosystem of location services and payment processing.
So what will be the trends for the next ten years? I really can't predict the consumer side of things. After all, I have a 13 year old rear projection TV, and just replaced a 2014 model year iPhone with a 2018 model. I bought a 2015 model year car about two years ago and intend to drive it as long as I can. I was a later adopter of Netflix streaming, finally joined Amazon Prime in 2019, but did subscribe to Disney+ within weeks of its launch.
My first prediction would be streaming surpasses broadcast and cable/satellite. Some channels will likely die off and fade away. Every media company will offer a streaming platform. People will expect an "all you can eat" model from the streaming providers, and there will be a war among the providers as to who can provide the most content. I also expect more ad supported "freemium" models to emerge. Related to this, I expect to see more audio streaming. Ad supported streaming has a strong potential because internet advertising offers the highest level of targeting and customization, which is something broadcast is not capable of providing. Streaming also offers the potential for interactivity, so the idea of interactive television could finally become a reality, with the viewer able to choose from different content rated version, and select from multiple story arcs. The other likelihood is, with all of the new streaming services, and the competition between them, Netflix's market cap will come down to Earth in the decade of the 2020s.
My second prediction is some autonomous vehicles will become mainstream by the end of the decade. What form I do not know. It may be limited to some kinds of minibuses on fixed routes in dedicated lanes, or it may be Level 4 or 5 autonomous automobiles. If Level 4 or 5 autonomous passenger vehicles become mainstream by the middle of the decade, Uber and Lyft will survive and likely thrive. If autonomous passenger vehicles do not become mainstream by the end of the decade, Uber and Lyft will disappear in current form. What is important is even if automated vehicles are limited to certain lanes, the idea of an autonomous minivan carpool-like service would be disruptive compared to the alternative of less frequent city buses. I think the significant thing to consider is, automated vehicles are likely to first appear in a form we are not expecting. Perhaps automated Bus Rapid Transit in places without existing mass transit (or mass transit driver unions).
In the business space I occupy, IT, I have better ideas, simply because I get exposed to my employer's roadmaps and hear about the strategic IT plans of customers.
My first predicted trend is edge computing. The push to the cloud will over-reach, and the overreach will be first seen where low latency and high bandwidth are needed. This will drive edge computing, if for no other purpose than to process and compress local data sets before uploading them to the cloud.
The best analogy for edge computing are content delivery networks (CDNs) today. If one looks at the history of CDNs, they originally were created to deal with the limited bandwidth of the internet, and limited computing power of internet servers. The appeal of CDNs in the era of the early dial-up internet faded as broadband penetration increased, but they would become critical again with the rise of downlodable and streaming media.
I mentioned Netflix and the rise of streaming media replacing traditional DVDs and CDs. What makes Netflix unique is its content delivery network, Open Connect. Some people love to point out Netflix was an early and aggressive adopter of Amazon Web Services. But when you watch a show on Netflix, it is not streaming from AWS, or from AWS' content delivery network, but from Netflix's own CDN. Netflix negotiated with ISPs to place their CDN appliances in the ISP's facilities. In most cases, this means the local telephone exchange facility for DSL based services, and the cable head-end for cable modem based services. This means Netflix is only streaming over the proverbial "last mile" of the Internet. Programs are pushed out to the Netflix Open Connect appliances ahead of availability. This is why when a new season of a show drops, millions of people can binge watch it with no slowdown of the Internet.
At the end of the 2010 decade, Disney launched Disney+. Prior to launching Disney+, Disney had to contract with existing CDN providers to ensure they could support the expected customer base. While the specifics are confidential, it is speculated Disney contracted with many CDN providers to ensure they had content as close as possible to their customers.
Video streaming providers and content delivery networks provide an important archetype for the future of edge computing. In additional to content delivery networks, there will need to be compute delivery networks.
Given today's Internet bandwidth, CDNs provide more value as a latency reducer. The latency for a web page, or simple streaming videos can easily be measured in the tens of milliseconds. However, edge computing will likely require sub 10 millisecond latency, and perhaps sub 5 millisecond latency. It will not be possible to simply locate compute resources in the same facility as existing CDNs.
It might be an ideal use case for existing local data centers, such as colocation facilities and existing corporate data centers. Alternatively, edge compute networks could be built in conjunction with 5G network facilities. 5G and edge compute facilities might be to the 2020s what "cloud plus mobile" was for the 2010s. 5G's limited broadcast distance will require many facilities. These facilities will connect into backhaul fiber networks. These new fiber networks will be installed throughout urban and suburban areas. It would be easy to connect an edge compute network facility to the 5G backhaul network. We have ten years to build this out a combined 5G and edge computing infrastructure, so I do expect it to look new and different, not bolted on.
My second prediction is AI goes mainstream. There was a lot of noise about AI in the last decade, peaking in 2018. Hype was bracketed with warnings of another "AI Winter". NVIDIA's market cap ran up to an incredible high, only to lose half its value. Companies bid up to seven figures for newly minted data scientist PhDs. But not much was visibly produced by AI. Most if it was invisible, things like fraud detection. That which was visible was not promising: people killed by self-driving automobiles, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, disturbing deepfakes, etc.
Part of the problem is we are still in the early days of AI. However, Moore's Law continues, academic efforts around machine learning and deep learning have expanded, software continues to improve, and companies are becoming more experienced in AI, what it is good for, and what it is not currently good for. This will lead to a rationalization, a focusing, which will produce usable results. Many of these uses cases will be simpler than the hype of the last decade.
The other thing which is likely to happen, which has not happened yet, is the commercialization of AI services. Today, each potential user of AI has to build their own AI environment. Sure, they can leverage cloud providers for the GPU infrastructure, and they leverage the open source tools, but they have to employ data scientists to build the training models, prepare the data, train the models, test the inference, etc. The idea of a third-party AI organization specializing in particular use cases, such as retail loss prevention, coming in and doing a complete AI based solution from data identification to data optimization to training to implementation of a final product is yet to be mainstream. Once it is, we will see more of deployment of AI. I expect data scientists employed by large retailers and large banks to create startups focused on implementing AI solutions.
The last IT related prediction I will make for the next decade is the idea of "everything as a service". The public cloud providers have changed the way enterprise IT customers consume resources and services. Many customers never implemented significant charge-back or show-back mechanisms to measure the cost of providing services. The idea of pay for use on premises IT was a feature of the mainframe and has been explored for decades in the open systems space. AWS's on-premise Outposts platform can be consumed either in an opex or capex model. I have seen some customers push back on opex models (software subscriptions) in favor of capex, and I have to wonder if it may be in part due to public cloud and SaaS opex expenditures consuming their opex budget, leaving IT with only capex remaining. If this is true, I expect budgets will evolve over time to a more opex heavy model. If some customers prefer opex models, and some capex models, this means vendors must provide both. I think we will see this with both software and hardware.
Regardless, I expect we will see more change in the next ten years than we saw in the last ten years. The pace of change of technology is accelerating. It is hard to notice because we are conditioned to the current time, and we are conditioned to change, so we only see change in retrospective.
Friday, December 27, 2019
Urbanization, or a Return to Rural
MIT Sloan Management Review offered its "Nine Megatrends to Watch" for the next decade.
One of these proposed Megatrends is "Urbanization". Sloan says:
The corollary is I read over at the Financial Samurai blog. He is looking at various commercial real estate investments in secondary cities. Including crowdsourced REITs focused on this market. So someone is putting money on the idea the major metropolises are reaching their limit in terms of crowding and cost, and businesses will expand into secondary cities.
Living in the Atlanta, and reading about businesses moving from Atlanta to Nashville and Charlotte to escape the crowding and traffic of Atlanta suggests there is a trend to build the next great secondary city, the kind of place Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, and Orlando were in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And I also believe there will be a rise of tertiary cities. Hip small cities not too far from major metropolises.
My Megatrend to watch for is the rise of these new secondary and tertiary places.
One of these proposed Megatrends is "Urbanization". Sloan says:
Urbanization: Two-thirds of us will live in cities. The urbanization of our populations will increase, creating more megacities as well as small- and medium-size metropolises. Countervailing forces will include a rising cost of living in the most desirable cities. The effects will include the need for more big buildings with better management technologies (big data and AI that makes buildings much more efficient), and we will need more food moved in from where we grow it to where we eat it — or rapidly expand urban agriculture."Urban agriculture". Whenever I see this phrase I throw up in my mouth a little bit. We are able to support the food needs of 8 million people in New York City because of scale agriculture in rural areas as well as foot imported from the southern hemisphere. The idea of hydroponic organic rooftop farms, encased in greenhouses to deal with New York's climate, and providing a steady supply of year round fresh vegetables to the local city street corner bodega is just fantasy. This, along with the fact that some cities are collapsing under load as we speak, in 2019, with an inability to house people, no ability to support the working class a city requires (plumbers, electricians, firefighters, cops, etc.), and serious hygiene issues is why I think every urban center has a maximum load. And many are near it, and some have exceeded it.
The corollary is I read over at the Financial Samurai blog. He is looking at various commercial real estate investments in secondary cities. Including crowdsourced REITs focused on this market. So someone is putting money on the idea the major metropolises are reaching their limit in terms of crowding and cost, and businesses will expand into secondary cities.
Living in the Atlanta, and reading about businesses moving from Atlanta to Nashville and Charlotte to escape the crowding and traffic of Atlanta suggests there is a trend to build the next great secondary city, the kind of place Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, and Orlando were in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And I also believe there will be a rise of tertiary cities. Hip small cities not too far from major metropolises.
My Megatrend to watch for is the rise of these new secondary and tertiary places.
Monday, December 16, 2019
The U.S. Airline Pilot Shortage, and the Airbus Opportunity
I saw a post on a travel board about Delta planning to hire 8,000 pilots over the next decade.
There is a demographic wave caused by FAA mandatory pilot retirement at age 65 (used to be 60 before 2007) and the ongoing wave of Baby Boomers hitting age 65. The first half of the Baby Boomer airline pilots were part of the Vietnam era. The second half of the Baby Boomer pilots were part of the 1980s Cold War era. Most of these Baby Boomer airline pilots came from the military. Behind them are the GenX pilots. Demographically there are many fewer GenX compared to Baby Boomers, and those born after 1970 got caught in the post-Cold War military downsizing, which was significant. I graduated in 1989, and the ROTC class behind mine had most of their pilot slots eliminated. My class experienced the "banked pilots", where pilots who graduated from flight school had no cockpit to go to, and had to wait 2-3 years to go to a flying assignment. Older pilots were pushed into staff jobs or pushed out using early retirement and mid-career pilots were pushed out using much tough promotion boards. The Air Force in the early 1990s shrank to about half of its airplane size from the peak of the Reagan Cold War buildup.
This was not a big problem for the airlines as they had a glut of pilots pushed out of the military, and then the Dot-Com bust happened along with the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the resulting recession caused a big reduction in airline business. Many of those pilots who went to the airlines in the late 1990s were furloughed in 2001, and only returned several year later. The pilots returning from furlough, combined with the 2007 retirement age change gave an artificial bump to the airline pilot staffing.
While the Millennial cohort is much larger than the GenX cohort, and the first wave Millennials who flew as military pilots completed their military service commitments around 2015, there are far fewer Millennial military pilots because the military is so much smaller than it was during the Baby Boomer years.
Add to that the 2013 FAA requirement that regional airlines can only hire first officers with ATP certificates and the result is there are a lot fewer airline pilot candidates in the hiring pool. In the past, the regional airlines provided a pipeline for non-military pilots to build the hours and experience needed to qualify for the major airlines.
The ATP requirement for regional FOs is probably why there is so much up-gauging in the regional space. Replacing many 50-seat RJ flights with fewer 70 seat RJs, and shifting RJ flights to 100-seat plus major airline metal is a part of this.
But what surprises me is the continued replacement of larger 200-seat and above domestic airframes (767-300, 757-200) with 150 seat 737-800s and A320s. With a looming pilot shortage, it seems a return to the 1970s and 1980s 250-seat domestic airframes (DC-10, L-1011, A300, 767), but with more efficient aircraft, would be worth considering. I know the airlines love the idea of hourly frequency between major markets, but 90 minute frequency with 50% larger airframes might be a better way to deal with the looming pilot shortage.
I wonder if Airbus would consider an "A322" further stretch of the A321, perhaps based on the A321XLR weights but with a longer fuselage approaching the capacity of the 757-300 to go after the 225-250 seat domestic market. My guess is Airbus could further stretch the A321 to add about six rows of seats bringing the capacity of a proposed A322 to about 225 in a typical 2-class domestic configuration. The idea would be to use the wing, gross weights, and engines of the A321XLR, but with the fuel capacity of the A321NEO, to target at maximum range, the LAX-NYC transcontinental market. American Airlines and Delta have both used 767-300ER international configured aircraft for this market, and also premium configured 757s and A321s. With a premium seat offering, the seating capacity for an A322 would be much lower than 225, which would put it well within transcontinental range with a base A321NEO fuel capacity. Other major city pairs should have no problems with a 225 seat capacity and an A321NEO fuel capacity.
Boeing, quite simply, cannot offer a product in this space. They cannot stretch the 737 beyond the 737-10MAX. Boeing could dust off the 757-300, build an entirely new composite wing (needed to reduce the weight to make such an airplane competitive), find an acceptable engine, and put a 787 flight deck on the airplane (for crew training commonality), and they would have a competitive product. Such a "757-9X" would likely be well received by any airline who has a strong Boeing fleet presence. But this would be a huge undertaking given the out of production state of the 757. And Boeing is too busy trying to fix the disaster which is the 737MAX, and is trying to get the 777-X out the door.
There is a demographic wave caused by FAA mandatory pilot retirement at age 65 (used to be 60 before 2007) and the ongoing wave of Baby Boomers hitting age 65. The first half of the Baby Boomer airline pilots were part of the Vietnam era. The second half of the Baby Boomer pilots were part of the 1980s Cold War era. Most of these Baby Boomer airline pilots came from the military. Behind them are the GenX pilots. Demographically there are many fewer GenX compared to Baby Boomers, and those born after 1970 got caught in the post-Cold War military downsizing, which was significant. I graduated in 1989, and the ROTC class behind mine had most of their pilot slots eliminated. My class experienced the "banked pilots", where pilots who graduated from flight school had no cockpit to go to, and had to wait 2-3 years to go to a flying assignment. Older pilots were pushed into staff jobs or pushed out using early retirement and mid-career pilots were pushed out using much tough promotion boards. The Air Force in the early 1990s shrank to about half of its airplane size from the peak of the Reagan Cold War buildup.
This was not a big problem for the airlines as they had a glut of pilots pushed out of the military, and then the Dot-Com bust happened along with the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the resulting recession caused a big reduction in airline business. Many of those pilots who went to the airlines in the late 1990s were furloughed in 2001, and only returned several year later. The pilots returning from furlough, combined with the 2007 retirement age change gave an artificial bump to the airline pilot staffing.
While the Millennial cohort is much larger than the GenX cohort, and the first wave Millennials who flew as military pilots completed their military service commitments around 2015, there are far fewer Millennial military pilots because the military is so much smaller than it was during the Baby Boomer years.
Add to that the 2013 FAA requirement that regional airlines can only hire first officers with ATP certificates and the result is there are a lot fewer airline pilot candidates in the hiring pool. In the past, the regional airlines provided a pipeline for non-military pilots to build the hours and experience needed to qualify for the major airlines.
The ATP requirement for regional FOs is probably why there is so much up-gauging in the regional space. Replacing many 50-seat RJ flights with fewer 70 seat RJs, and shifting RJ flights to 100-seat plus major airline metal is a part of this.
But what surprises me is the continued replacement of larger 200-seat and above domestic airframes (767-300, 757-200) with 150 seat 737-800s and A320s. With a looming pilot shortage, it seems a return to the 1970s and 1980s 250-seat domestic airframes (DC-10, L-1011, A300, 767), but with more efficient aircraft, would be worth considering. I know the airlines love the idea of hourly frequency between major markets, but 90 minute frequency with 50% larger airframes might be a better way to deal with the looming pilot shortage.
I wonder if Airbus would consider an "A322" further stretch of the A321, perhaps based on the A321XLR weights but with a longer fuselage approaching the capacity of the 757-300 to go after the 225-250 seat domestic market. My guess is Airbus could further stretch the A321 to add about six rows of seats bringing the capacity of a proposed A322 to about 225 in a typical 2-class domestic configuration. The idea would be to use the wing, gross weights, and engines of the A321XLR, but with the fuel capacity of the A321NEO, to target at maximum range, the LAX-NYC transcontinental market. American Airlines and Delta have both used 767-300ER international configured aircraft for this market, and also premium configured 757s and A321s. With a premium seat offering, the seating capacity for an A322 would be much lower than 225, which would put it well within transcontinental range with a base A321NEO fuel capacity. Other major city pairs should have no problems with a 225 seat capacity and an A321NEO fuel capacity.
Boeing, quite simply, cannot offer a product in this space. They cannot stretch the 737 beyond the 737-10MAX. Boeing could dust off the 757-300, build an entirely new composite wing (needed to reduce the weight to make such an airplane competitive), find an acceptable engine, and put a 787 flight deck on the airplane (for crew training commonality), and they would have a competitive product. Such a "757-9X" would likely be well received by any airline who has a strong Boeing fleet presence. But this would be a huge undertaking given the out of production state of the 757. And Boeing is too busy trying to fix the disaster which is the 737MAX, and is trying to get the 777-X out the door.
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
The Simulation
Am I the only one who finds it mildly humorous that some highly intelligent, publicly atheist/agnostic people posit we are living in a simulation?
Let's unpack this.
A simulation is a designed creation. To those residing in the simulation, the simulated world is those residents reality--their physical world. And if we are to take it a step further, either the residents were captured and placed in the simulation, without realizing they were captured, transported, and placed, or the residents are simulations themselves--computer artificial intelligences that are part of their virtual world. Indeed, this is exactly what the originator of the Simulation Hypothesis, Nick Bostrom, posited.
Like I said, let's unpack this.
If we are digital creatures, living in a simulation, for all intents and purposes the simulation is our universe, our reality. As digital creatures, our digital world is native to us. It is natural to us. It is our natural world.
The other fact is the creator or creators of the simulation represent a super-intelligence compared to the residents of the simulation. The creator(s) of the simulation is/are all-powerful over the simulation--they could change the simulation in a way that would appear to violate the physical laws the residents experience. They could destroy part or all of the simulation at any point. In other words, compared to the residents of the simulation, the simulation's creator(s) is/are omnipotent. The creator(s) exists external to the simulation. If the simulation is a universe, the creator(s) exist in a different universe, a different dimension--the two realms would never cross. Or could they? Perhaps it is possible for a creator to create an avatar and enter the simulation, experiencing the simulated world, while maintaining their omnipotence, a form of dual entity, fully simulation avatar, able to experience the simulated world, and fully creator, able to exhibit omnipotence over the simulation if they chose to do so.
Even if the creator(s) of the simulation allowed the artificial intelligence of the residents to control their own actions, the creator(s), as the author(s) of the algorithm, may be able to predict with perfect accuracy the actions of the residents.
We have come to a reasonable conclusion the creator(s) of the simulation are external to what the residents of the simulation consider their natural world. The creator(s) is/are extra-natural when compared to the residents.
We have come to a reasonable conclusion the creator(s) of the simulation operate in a manner that makes them superior to the domain the residents of the simulation consider their natural world. The creator(s) is/are supernatural when compared to the residents.
We have come to a reasonable conclusion the creator(s) of the simulation are all-powerful compared to the residents of the simulation they created, and the simulated world they created. The creator(s) is/are omnipotent when compared to the residents.
And these brilliant atheists/agnostics who think there is a possibility we are living in a simulation created by and controlled by an all-powerful super-intelligence simultaneously believe those who believe in an omnipotent, supernatural, spiritual creator are ignorant rubes.
Got it.
Let's unpack this.
A simulation is a designed creation. To those residing in the simulation, the simulated world is those residents reality--their physical world. And if we are to take it a step further, either the residents were captured and placed in the simulation, without realizing they were captured, transported, and placed, or the residents are simulations themselves--computer artificial intelligences that are part of their virtual world. Indeed, this is exactly what the originator of the Simulation Hypothesis, Nick Bostrom, posited.
Like I said, let's unpack this.
If we are digital creatures, living in a simulation, for all intents and purposes the simulation is our universe, our reality. As digital creatures, our digital world is native to us. It is natural to us. It is our natural world.
The other fact is the creator or creators of the simulation represent a super-intelligence compared to the residents of the simulation. The creator(s) of the simulation is/are all-powerful over the simulation--they could change the simulation in a way that would appear to violate the physical laws the residents experience. They could destroy part or all of the simulation at any point. In other words, compared to the residents of the simulation, the simulation's creator(s) is/are omnipotent. The creator(s) exists external to the simulation. If the simulation is a universe, the creator(s) exist in a different universe, a different dimension--the two realms would never cross. Or could they? Perhaps it is possible for a creator to create an avatar and enter the simulation, experiencing the simulated world, while maintaining their omnipotence, a form of dual entity, fully simulation avatar, able to experience the simulated world, and fully creator, able to exhibit omnipotence over the simulation if they chose to do so.
Even if the creator(s) of the simulation allowed the artificial intelligence of the residents to control their own actions, the creator(s), as the author(s) of the algorithm, may be able to predict with perfect accuracy the actions of the residents.
We have come to a reasonable conclusion the creator(s) of the simulation are external to what the residents of the simulation consider their natural world. The creator(s) is/are extra-natural when compared to the residents.
We have come to a reasonable conclusion the creator(s) of the simulation operate in a manner that makes them superior to the domain the residents of the simulation consider their natural world. The creator(s) is/are supernatural when compared to the residents.
We have come to a reasonable conclusion the creator(s) of the simulation are all-powerful compared to the residents of the simulation they created, and the simulated world they created. The creator(s) is/are omnipotent when compared to the residents.
And these brilliant atheists/agnostics who think there is a possibility we are living in a simulation created by and controlled by an all-powerful super-intelligence simultaneously believe those who believe in an omnipotent, supernatural, spiritual creator are ignorant rubes.
Got it.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
What should a "wealth tax" look like?
The topic of a wealth tax has come up quite a bit over the last couple of years. Certainly the writings of Thomas Piketty and concerns about wealth inequality and income inequality have raised the topic of a wealth tax, along with the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Recently, Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky (who was born and raised under communism in the Soviet Union) wrote on the topic, raising Bill Gates' tepid endorsement to the the title of his column.
It is important to note, Gates' recent tepid support for a wealth tax is very different from his prior position which was to increase the rate of taxation of capital. Gates correctly noted many of the super-wealthy generate income from capital gains, and taxing capital gains at the ordinary income rate would go a long way towards tax fairness. In fact, it is the lower rate of taxation for long-term capital gains that is leveraged in many forms of executive compensation. It is not even stock options any more, where the executive has "skin in the game", now it is direct stock grants.
Another potential form of wealth tax long supported by Gates is the inheritance or estate tax. This is another idea which comes up from time to time, today more focused on very large estates. The estate tax of the 20th century had very low thresholds and was very destructive to small businesses and family farms. It was deeply immoral in how it was implemented. The estate tax was far more destructive to those with small fortunes than those with large fortunes, so it was understandable that the super wealthy like Gates and Warren Buffett favored it--It had the effect of destroying potential rising competitors to large businesses. Gates' lawyer father could afford to send Gates to Harvard. The son of a family farmer who loses his parents farm to the estate tax when his parents dies cannot afford to send his son to Harvard. While generational wealth can create generational plutocrats, generational wealth can also create generational middle classedness, free of the need of government support, and that is something we should strive for.
The last idea for a wealth tax is an expatriation tax applied to those who renounce U.S. citizenship. I am not sure this represents a huge revenue opportunity.
Most of the time, a wealth tax is presented either as a direct or indirect solution to wealth inequality. At the very least, it is presented as an alternative to wealth inequality. But what is wealth inequality? Equality and inequality suggest two sides of an equation. In the case of inequality, one side of the equation has more, the other side has less. The problem is, taxing those with large amounts of wealth only addresses one side of the equation, and it addresses the less urgent one. It is those without wealth who are believed to be the victims of inequality.
Interestingly, Bershidsky column presents the single biggest argument against a wealth tax: The open-ended nature of what to do with the proceeds. He speaks of "clean energy subsidies" and "useful government programs". What makes these more worthy? Why not use the proceeds from a wealth tax to recapitalize the military? Fund higher education? Or 1,000 other pet projects? One can see the obvious problem with this. It is to politicians what the Sears Wish Book was to children of my generation, or what lottery winnings are hoped for for some.
This raises a more important question: What is wealth? To put it simply, wealth is savings and investments. Wealth is a form of deferred income. How is wealth created? Msot often, it starts with some form of income. Ordinary income saved. Income from a gift or a sale of something. What is wealth used for? Usually, the intent of wealth is to use it in the future as a form of cash flow, or income, if you will. To use wealth, one has to liquidate it and turn it back into cash. What is the most common form of wealth today, and where is it? Most wealth today is directly or indirectly owned by the upper middle class, if the form of capital stock, most often in retirement accounts or in insurance reserves backing up life and property policies owned by those in the upper middle class, or in the pension reserves of middle class pensioners.
What is the intended use for most wealth? Given most of the wealth is in retirement savings and pension funds, the obvious use for wealth is for retirement income, along with insurance to provide financial protection in the case of a lost home or life.
What are the downsides of not having this kind of wealth? What do those in the lower class and lower middle class not have due to their lack of wealth? First, they face financial insecurity in old age, either in the form of underfunded retirement, a lack of ability to purchase supplemental health insurance, and perhaps a need to work far into old age. It also means a likely lack of life insurance in middle age.
So treating the effects of wealth inequality means treating the above. Not with "clean energy subsidies" but with things like addressing the underfunded Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Perhaps increasing Social Security payments for those at the bottom of the Social Security scale. Perhaps broadening Medicare coverage to better handle things like the Medicare Part D "doughnut hole" and to better support Medicaid funding of long-term care. It also means funding SSI and Medicaid for those aged who do not qualify for Social Security and Medicare.
Those would be a moral use for the proceeds of a wealth tax. The only moral use case I can think of. It would directly address wealth inequality, because it would directly address the effects of wealth inequality.
Now what to tax? I personally believe our current tax system is deeply immoral. I do support taxing capital gains at the ordinary income rate. I can support an estate tax with a very generous exemption ($5-10 million), a very graduated scale (starting at about 10%), and a very reasonable top-end rate limit--more like 40% instead of Piketty's insane 90%. One can make the argument the estate tax is simply a form of capital gains tax, since the gains are not yet realized. The idea of the estate tax being earmarked to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds makes considerable sense, and it keeps the politicians hands off of the proceeds for their pet projects.
There are better alternatives to Social Security, and better ways to fund Social Security and Medicare. But they are beyond the scope of this post.
It is important to note, Gates' recent tepid support for a wealth tax is very different from his prior position which was to increase the rate of taxation of capital. Gates correctly noted many of the super-wealthy generate income from capital gains, and taxing capital gains at the ordinary income rate would go a long way towards tax fairness. In fact, it is the lower rate of taxation for long-term capital gains that is leveraged in many forms of executive compensation. It is not even stock options any more, where the executive has "skin in the game", now it is direct stock grants.
Another potential form of wealth tax long supported by Gates is the inheritance or estate tax. This is another idea which comes up from time to time, today more focused on very large estates. The estate tax of the 20th century had very low thresholds and was very destructive to small businesses and family farms. It was deeply immoral in how it was implemented. The estate tax was far more destructive to those with small fortunes than those with large fortunes, so it was understandable that the super wealthy like Gates and Warren Buffett favored it--It had the effect of destroying potential rising competitors to large businesses. Gates' lawyer father could afford to send Gates to Harvard. The son of a family farmer who loses his parents farm to the estate tax when his parents dies cannot afford to send his son to Harvard. While generational wealth can create generational plutocrats, generational wealth can also create generational middle classedness, free of the need of government support, and that is something we should strive for.
The last idea for a wealth tax is an expatriation tax applied to those who renounce U.S. citizenship. I am not sure this represents a huge revenue opportunity.
Most of the time, a wealth tax is presented either as a direct or indirect solution to wealth inequality. At the very least, it is presented as an alternative to wealth inequality. But what is wealth inequality? Equality and inequality suggest two sides of an equation. In the case of inequality, one side of the equation has more, the other side has less. The problem is, taxing those with large amounts of wealth only addresses one side of the equation, and it addresses the less urgent one. It is those without wealth who are believed to be the victims of inequality.
Interestingly, Bershidsky column presents the single biggest argument against a wealth tax: The open-ended nature of what to do with the proceeds. He speaks of "clean energy subsidies" and "useful government programs". What makes these more worthy? Why not use the proceeds from a wealth tax to recapitalize the military? Fund higher education? Or 1,000 other pet projects? One can see the obvious problem with this. It is to politicians what the Sears Wish Book was to children of my generation, or what lottery winnings are hoped for for some.
This raises a more important question: What is wealth? To put it simply, wealth is savings and investments. Wealth is a form of deferred income. How is wealth created? Msot often, it starts with some form of income. Ordinary income saved. Income from a gift or a sale of something. What is wealth used for? Usually, the intent of wealth is to use it in the future as a form of cash flow, or income, if you will. To use wealth, one has to liquidate it and turn it back into cash. What is the most common form of wealth today, and where is it? Most wealth today is directly or indirectly owned by the upper middle class, if the form of capital stock, most often in retirement accounts or in insurance reserves backing up life and property policies owned by those in the upper middle class, or in the pension reserves of middle class pensioners.
What is the intended use for most wealth? Given most of the wealth is in retirement savings and pension funds, the obvious use for wealth is for retirement income, along with insurance to provide financial protection in the case of a lost home or life.
What are the downsides of not having this kind of wealth? What do those in the lower class and lower middle class not have due to their lack of wealth? First, they face financial insecurity in old age, either in the form of underfunded retirement, a lack of ability to purchase supplemental health insurance, and perhaps a need to work far into old age. It also means a likely lack of life insurance in middle age.
So treating the effects of wealth inequality means treating the above. Not with "clean energy subsidies" but with things like addressing the underfunded Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Perhaps increasing Social Security payments for those at the bottom of the Social Security scale. Perhaps broadening Medicare coverage to better handle things like the Medicare Part D "doughnut hole" and to better support Medicaid funding of long-term care. It also means funding SSI and Medicaid for those aged who do not qualify for Social Security and Medicare.
Those would be a moral use for the proceeds of a wealth tax. The only moral use case I can think of. It would directly address wealth inequality, because it would directly address the effects of wealth inequality.
Now what to tax? I personally believe our current tax system is deeply immoral. I do support taxing capital gains at the ordinary income rate. I can support an estate tax with a very generous exemption ($5-10 million), a very graduated scale (starting at about 10%), and a very reasonable top-end rate limit--more like 40% instead of Piketty's insane 90%. One can make the argument the estate tax is simply a form of capital gains tax, since the gains are not yet realized. The idea of the estate tax being earmarked to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds makes considerable sense, and it keeps the politicians hands off of the proceeds for their pet projects.
There are better alternatives to Social Security, and better ways to fund Social Security and Medicare. But they are beyond the scope of this post.
Friday, May 31, 2019
What should a “free” tuition and “student loan forgiveness” program look like?
The idea of offering free tuition to all students, regardless of major or GPA is an invitation for moral hazard. A more reasonable approach is to only offer free tuition to the following:
Needed majors – for example, elementary and secondary education. The payback being the graduate will benefit society.
High-income majors – for example, engineering. The payback being the higher taxes paid by the graduate’s higher lifetime earnings will offset the tuition.
Students who agree to take a government service commitment – for example, students who agree to work for a civilian government organization, such as a nurse agreeing to work for four years for a state public health service. The payback being the service gained.
GPA should matter. Most scholarships require the student maintain a certain GPA. The same should apply to a federally funded tuition program.
Caps. The value should be capped at the in-state tuition of the state the student graduated high school in. In most cases today that is about $45,000 ($11,250 per year).
A beneficiary surtax. Why not require everyone who benefits from this program to pay an additional few percent of income tax, say 2.5%, for 10 years – no exceptions. This is skin in the game.
For community colleges, there would be a similar program based on two years at the average community college tuition, selected fields of study, and a 5-year surtax.
What does this mean? It means the in-state engineering student with a 3.5 GPA at State Tech gets 100% of their tuition paid, while the Intersectional Grievance Studies major at Private U has to self-fund.
The same concept could be applied to loan forgiveness, with one important additional requirement: Is the graduate current on their loan payments?
The engineer with $75,000 of outstanding student debt, who graduated with a GPA above the cutoff would be eligible for $45,000 of loan forgiveness, despite the fact he or she earns $75,000 per year. The teacher could take a qualifying job at a qualifying school and get $45,000 of loan forgiveness. The Intersectional Grievance Studies major at Private U with a middling GPA who has $200,000 in debt and earns $20,000 as a barista will need to get a second job.
The point is, we (the taxpayers) deserve to get something back for our money. And we (society) deserve a societal benefit. A good teacher at an inner-city school, a good nurse at a public health clinic, and yes a software developer making $100,000 and paying substantially more in taxes than the average person his or her age are all benefiting society.
The government, between the Department of Education and the Department of Labor has a ton of data. This actually is not hard.
But there is still a problem, and it is the elephant in the room. The exploding costs of college education. Because of this, any participation by any university must be tied to dramatic cost controls. Again, the government has a ton of data. Government economists can extrapolate what a college education should cost in 2019 based on historic data. The actual cost is well above that. I am not speaking of an incremental decrease in the rate of increase of tuition, but a freeze at an immediate minimum, followed by bending the cost curve down to produce year over year inflation adjusted tuition, fee, and book reductions. Imagine the impact if suddenly 50% of the student bodies of every university were eligible for massive amounts of financial aid, dependent on the university going on a the financial equivalent of Keto. Imagine the prospect of a university losing a significant percentage of its incoming class to the cross-state college who is better managed.
And this is the part that makes the cost of such a program worthwhile. If the universities do not do their part, the cost of the program is limited. Imagine the impact if the loan forgiveness were not immediate, but was phased, and loan forgiveness was tied to the university making progress on cost reductions. Can you imagine the impact to alumni donations and alumni pressure?
Yes, this would be a costly program. But the idea of tying it to outcomes, such as societal needs and a direct incentive to universities to reduce costs makes it far more worthwhile than simply raining hundred dollar bills onto each and every incoming GenZ college student and every Millennial college graduate with outstanding loans.
Another key idea behind this is the government could start with a more limited program, and scale it up or scale it down as funding permits. By varying the qualified majors, and the qualifying GPAs, qualifying jobs, etc., the program could be controlled. Of course it could also be abused, but the key would be a system which can be scaled up or down. The scaling could even be hard coded into the law based on the appropriated funds. More funds appropriated, scale it up. Fewer funds appropriated, automatic scale down in accordance with the law, not the whims of Congress.
Needed majors – for example, elementary and secondary education. The payback being the graduate will benefit society.
High-income majors – for example, engineering. The payback being the higher taxes paid by the graduate’s higher lifetime earnings will offset the tuition.
Students who agree to take a government service commitment – for example, students who agree to work for a civilian government organization, such as a nurse agreeing to work for four years for a state public health service. The payback being the service gained.
GPA should matter. Most scholarships require the student maintain a certain GPA. The same should apply to a federally funded tuition program.
Caps. The value should be capped at the in-state tuition of the state the student graduated high school in. In most cases today that is about $45,000 ($11,250 per year).
A beneficiary surtax. Why not require everyone who benefits from this program to pay an additional few percent of income tax, say 2.5%, for 10 years – no exceptions. This is skin in the game.
For community colleges, there would be a similar program based on two years at the average community college tuition, selected fields of study, and a 5-year surtax.
What does this mean? It means the in-state engineering student with a 3.5 GPA at State Tech gets 100% of their tuition paid, while the Intersectional Grievance Studies major at Private U has to self-fund.
The same concept could be applied to loan forgiveness, with one important additional requirement: Is the graduate current on their loan payments?
The engineer with $75,000 of outstanding student debt, who graduated with a GPA above the cutoff would be eligible for $45,000 of loan forgiveness, despite the fact he or she earns $75,000 per year. The teacher could take a qualifying job at a qualifying school and get $45,000 of loan forgiveness. The Intersectional Grievance Studies major at Private U with a middling GPA who has $200,000 in debt and earns $20,000 as a barista will need to get a second job.
The point is, we (the taxpayers) deserve to get something back for our money. And we (society) deserve a societal benefit. A good teacher at an inner-city school, a good nurse at a public health clinic, and yes a software developer making $100,000 and paying substantially more in taxes than the average person his or her age are all benefiting society.
The government, between the Department of Education and the Department of Labor has a ton of data. This actually is not hard.
But there is still a problem, and it is the elephant in the room. The exploding costs of college education. Because of this, any participation by any university must be tied to dramatic cost controls. Again, the government has a ton of data. Government economists can extrapolate what a college education should cost in 2019 based on historic data. The actual cost is well above that. I am not speaking of an incremental decrease in the rate of increase of tuition, but a freeze at an immediate minimum, followed by bending the cost curve down to produce year over year inflation adjusted tuition, fee, and book reductions. Imagine the impact if suddenly 50% of the student bodies of every university were eligible for massive amounts of financial aid, dependent on the university going on a the financial equivalent of Keto. Imagine the prospect of a university losing a significant percentage of its incoming class to the cross-state college who is better managed.
And this is the part that makes the cost of such a program worthwhile. If the universities do not do their part, the cost of the program is limited. Imagine the impact if the loan forgiveness were not immediate, but was phased, and loan forgiveness was tied to the university making progress on cost reductions. Can you imagine the impact to alumni donations and alumni pressure?
Yes, this would be a costly program. But the idea of tying it to outcomes, such as societal needs and a direct incentive to universities to reduce costs makes it far more worthwhile than simply raining hundred dollar bills onto each and every incoming GenZ college student and every Millennial college graduate with outstanding loans.
Another key idea behind this is the government could start with a more limited program, and scale it up or scale it down as funding permits. By varying the qualified majors, and the qualifying GPAs, qualifying jobs, etc., the program could be controlled. Of course it could also be abused, but the key would be a system which can be scaled up or down. The scaling could even be hard coded into the law based on the appropriated funds. More funds appropriated, scale it up. Fewer funds appropriated, automatic scale down in accordance with the law, not the whims of Congress.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
In an Insane Society the Sane Man Must Appear Insane
[4/5: Updated to add Tim Ryan's candidacy]
[4/15: Updated to add Eric Swalwell's candidacy
[4/15: Updated to add comments on Pete Buttigieg]
[4/15: Updated to add comments on Andrew Yang]
[4/22: Updated to add Seth Moulton's candidacy]
[5/15: Updated to add Steve Bullock's and Michael Bennet's candidacies]
[5/16: Updated to add Bill de Blasio's candidacy]
Back in 1980, an excellent comedy on Marin County California, starring Martin Mull was released. It was called “Serial”, based on the original novel which was serialized in a Marin County alternative weekly newspaper before being published as a book.
The movie was not successful in theatrical release, but found more following once it made its way to premium cable channels such as HBO.
Near the end of the move, one of the secondary characters, Stokeley, a young teenage boy, checks on Martin Mull’s character, protagonist Harvey Holroyd, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Stokeley says to Harvey: "In an insane society the sane man must appear insane" to point out that Harvey was indeed the sane person in the insane society that was Marin County. Harvey asked Stokeley where he got that from, and Stokeley replies “Star Trek”. However, like Jules Winnfield’s infamous bible quote in Pulp Fiction, Stokeley’s Star Trek quote was not real. That line was never said in any Star Trek episode.
I recently divided the list of Democrat presidential candidates into a “Sane” and “Insane” group. Nothing against Democrats, one could do the same for the Republican party. The thing is, right now, like the GOP in 2016, the Democrats have a lot of presidential primary candidates.
By “Sane”, I mean center-left candidates who are careful to avoid being tagged as “extremist” or “radical” and are avoiding wholesale endorsement of popular, but hard to implement, proposals. By “Insane”, I mean progressive-left candidates who are eager to claim the progressive mantle, and are either offering, or endorsement popular, but hard to implement proposals.
The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Free College for All, $15 Minimum Wage, UBI, Jobs Guarantee, etc., endorsing multiple of these policies qualifies a candidate for the “Insane” tag. Distancing oneself from multiple of these policies qualifies a candidate for the “Sane” tag.
To dive deeper on this, consider Medicare for All. Medicare today comprises several parts. The original Medicare, Part A, is hospitalization only. What today we would call “catastrophic coverage”. Part A is either “earned” by working the equivalent of at least 10 years full time (or through a spouse who has done so). Otherwise, one must pay a premium to be insured under Part A. Everyone must pay a premium for Part B, which covers non-hospital physician visits. The premium is automatically deducted from Social Security pension payments. Everyone must pay a premium for Part D, which covers non-hospital prescription drugs. All three parts have deductibles and copays, which can be partially covered by enrolling in private Medicare supplement plans.
However, when most people hear “Medicare for All”, and indeed when most politicians promote “Medicare for All”, they are not speaking of a program of basic hospitalization insurance with additional premiums required for doctors’ visits, and optional private supplements. Instead, they are speaking of a program with no earned eligibility requirements and no premiums. While Medicare requires one to work and be a taxpayer, Medicare for All would cover all regardless of work status. Additionally, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Nancy Pelosi publicly stated her desire to get rid of copays, deductibles, and coinsurance. In addition, many progressive politicians are demanding coverage for vision, dental, and long-term care be included. Indeed, the current Medicare for All bill from Representative Pramila Jayapal would cover standard health care along with vision, dental, and substance-abuse care, and would not charge patients copays, or have deductibles.
Part of the problem with the original ACA was it was larded up with additional coverages, which increased the price for policies. But the lessons of why the ACA has failed to deliver have not been learned. Indeed, they have not even been investigated.
Some have proposed a universal, government paid for catastrophic coverage, similar to Medicare Part A, and then leverage employers and the ACA Exchange for general health insurance, which would solve the “Medical Bankruptcy” problem, but this flies against the demands of progressives.
The cost of a “Medicare for All” with full coverage at no cost to the patient is Insanely high. Bernie Sanders proposal of a few years ago was estimated to cost $32 trillion over 10 years. Those candidates who are looking at something less are trying to be Sane.
Likewise, the cost of the “Green New Deal” is Insanely high. One group estimated it at $93 trillion over ten years. This included $32 trillion for Medicare for All, which is included with the Green New Deal proposal, so the rest would be about $60 trillion. Others have discounted that estimate, but I did a simple estimate and came up with over $30 trillion just for changes to electrical power generation and changes needed convert homes to all-electric fuel, with no consideration to changes to commercial building, mass transit, or long-distance travel. When one adds in proposals like college loan debt forgiveness, and broader health care coverage beyond Sanders original plan, one can easily begin to approach $100 trillion over 10 years. The 2019 U.S. federal budget is $4.4 trillion. Even with the savings some of these programs would produce, it is not unreasonable to suggest it would require a doubling of the current annual budget, which is fiscally impossible. Or, to put it another way, it is Insane.
Then there is the Insane idea of amending the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College. First, that would never pass. An amendment requires a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the states, the very states which would lose their clout in such a change. Never mind the organizational nightmare a single national vote to a single national standard would create compared to 51 discrete federal votes under 51 state and district standards.
And the Insane idea of amending the Constitution to allow 16 year olds to vote. Many of the Democrats advocating for a 16 year old vote also advocated for 26 year old "children" to be covered by their parent's health insurance, and "children" under 21 to be restricted from purchasing tobacco and firearms. These same people have trotted out evidence a young man's brain has not completed development until age 25 to advocate for lesser criminal sentencing for those under the age of 25. If someone is responsible enough vote at age 16, one would think they are responsible enough to own a firearm--after all, government has access armed to force: police, military, etc.
Here is my list of Democrat candidates for president, and where they rate. I will explain some of my ratings after this list.
Sane (Generally Avoiding Full Support of the Most Controversial Policies)
Michael Bennet
Joe Biden
John Delaney
Amy Klobuchar
Seth Moulton
Tim Ryan
In Between Sane and Insane
Pete Buttigieg (Publicly Sane, Policy both Sane and Insane)
John Hickenlooper (Publicly Insane, Policy Sane)
Jay Inslee (Single-Issue, Policy Conflicted)
Insane (Supporting Multiple Controversial Policies)
Cory Booker
Steve Bullock
Julian Castro
Bill de Blasio
Tulsi Gabbard
Kirsten Gillibrand
Mike Gravel
Kamala Harris
Wayne Messam
Beto O'Rourke
Bernie Sanders
Eric Swalwell
Elizabeth Warren
Marianne Williamson
Andrew Yang
The reality is, as the Democrats’ Overton Window has shifted left, the center-left “Sane” candidates look increasingly like outsiders, or “Insane”. While the more radical, or “Insane” candidates, look “Sane”.
The same thing happened in 2016, as Trump began as clearly an “Insane” candidate, and by the end John Kasich looked positively nuts, refusing to drop out and babbling about his mailman father like Commander Queeg talking about strawberries. Indeed other “Sane” candidates, like Marco Rubio, tried to do the same “Insane” stunts as Trump, like making comparisons about hand size, or making insults. Bobby Jindal, arguably a “Sane” candidate, and the son of immigrants, stated “Immigration without assimilation is an invasion” to boost his strong border bona fides.
I expect we will see similar for the Democrats this time. Joe Biden, who in polling has the strongest chance to beat Trump, in large part because of his moderate history, is tacking left, and trying to position himself as “Woke”, to the point of disparaging the entire concept of British Common Law, in large part because it was created by “White Men”. British Common Law, along with Roman/Germanic/Napoleonic Civil Law (also created by “White Men”), undergirds the vast majority of the world’s legal system. Also, Biden is under coordinated attack to paint him as a sexual predator in order to bring down his candidacy.
Pete Buttigieg’s intersectional identity politic credentials are being debated. And he has tacked increasingly left. Buttigieg arguably is using his midwestern small-city mayor credentials to stake a claim in the “Sane” camp. Just this morning, on a local radio station, I heard a talk show host comment on Buttigieg and she said: “He sounds sane. He sounds moderate.” In other words, she also sees the Sane vs. Insane stratification, and considers “moderate” to be synonymous with “sane”. In other words, it is not just my opinion.
Update 4/15: Pete Buttigieg's position on college financial aid and college debt is Sane, very similar to Amy Klobuchar's proposals. This is a really big deal because Buttigieg announced it at the same time as he announced his official candidacy, and it represents a visible and significant shift away from the progressive edge. However, I would note, no Democrat nor Republican candidate has proposed any policy which would actually reduce the costs of college. The reality is the Educational-Political Complex has subsumed higher education, and has enormous political power to prevent such policies. Instead it rent-seeks via government grants and government guaranteed loans. Despite Buttigieg's Saneness on college funding, he continues to advocate for the quixotic idea of eliminating the Electoral College. For this reason, he remains in the "In Between Sane and Insane" camp.
Andrew Yang can sanely defend his UBI proposal, and indeed a UBI may be necessary at some point in the future, but in a period of historic low U3 unemployment and rising wages, now is clearly not the time. Yang increasingly is promoting his UBI in a way that seems less a serious national economic proposal, and more a tactical vote buying strategy. In addition, Yang has weighed in on the infant circumcision debate, which seems unpresidential. Just today Yang announced a new, critical policy position: Make Daylight Savings Time permanent. This is not serious.
Update 4/15: Andrew Yang has made some very Sane proposals along with his many Insane proposals. He may shift in the future to the "In Between Sane and Insane" group not because he is moderate in most positions, but because of the balance between his various positions. Yang appears to be courting controversy to gain publicity. A kind of "Trump from the Mirror Universe" approach (staying with the Star Trek theme of this post).
Jay Inslee is running on the single issue of Climate Change, and has endorsed the Green New Deal. One should always be cautious of single-issue candidates. Inslee is the governor of Washington state, which is home to Boeing, manufacturer of half of the jetliners used on planet Earth, and jet aircraft are one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses. Inslee has ushered tax deals to Boeing, and defended Boeing’s Washington jobs from loss to South Carolina and Kansas. Beyond the Green New Deal, Inslee’s book on battling Climate Change is dismissive of nuclear energy and puts too much confidence in solar and wind power. Other than his single-issue push Inslee is making a point to sound moderate by staking a claim against certain popular Democrat policy positions. However, Inslee’s simultaneous support the Green New Deal and the jetliner industry means Inslee is either a hypocrite or insane.
John Hickenlooper’s bizarre story about taking his mother to see “Deep Throat” puts his carefully crafted “Sane” credentials at risk.
Update 4/15: Eric Swalwell has announced his candidacy. He has a single-issue focus, in his case, on gun control. Based on Swalwell's Insane Twitter comments about attacking legal gun owners with nuclear weapons, he starts solidly in the Insane camp.
Update 4/22: Seth Moulton has announced his candidacy. Moulton has expressed full support for the Green New Deal, but is not in the Medicare for All camp, instead he only proposes to add a "Public Option" to the current Affordable Care Act. He also has not endorsed free college for all or student loan debt forgiveness. He is mostly Sane, and he should provide more detail on what his support of the Green New Deal actually means. Because he is avoiding Insane positions on health care and education, he starts in the Sane camp.
Update 5/15: Steve Bullock and Michael Bennet have announced their candidacies. Bullock is running as a single-issue candidate on campaign finance reform. I automatically put quixotic single-issue candidates in the Insane column because they are not serious candidates. Bennet is positioning himself as a rational centrist, albeit a milquetoast, undifferentiated centrist with no marque proposals. Bennet begins in the Sane camp.
Update 5/16: Bill de Blasio has announced his candidacy. This needs no explanation. Insane.
Big Money and Small Money, and how it tracks to Sane and Insane
In presidential politics, there are two sources of money: Big Money and Small Money. Big money is the large donors, corporations, PACs, etc. Small money is the grass roots individual donations. Generally, big money flows to “Sane” candidates. In 2016, the Democrats’ big money went to Clinton, while Sanders was the champion of small money. For the Republicans, the big money was split, and Trump was the beneficiary of small money. I believe the attacks on Biden are because he is seen as a threat in the big money space. Small money continues to be dominated by Sanders, although Beto O’Rourke had initial success with grass roots fundraising. If he can sustain it is another question. If Biden’s entry is blocked by sexual assault claims, the likely big money beneficiaries are Harris and Klobuchar. While I categorize Harris among the “Insane” for her public policy positions, she is likely to be seen as another Obama, a candidate with one public persona, and a different private persona. If any of the “old white men” (Biden, Delaney, Hickenlooper, or Inslee) gain traction, expect big money to flow their way. However, as soon as Harris is seen cavorting with big money donors, the progressive small donors will reject her.
Tack to the Left/Right in the Primary, Tack to the Center in the General Election
The ideas a Democrat primary candidate can run as a progressive in the primary and then run as a centrist in the general election, and a Republican primary candidate can run as a conservative in the primary and then a centrist in the general election, are long-proven paths. However, in the era of social media, that path may be obsolete. Part of the reason Hillary lost the general election to Trump is many of Sanders’ supporters refused to support Hillary. Some stayed home, some voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and some voted for Trump. Don’t forget Stein offered to step aside if Sanders would run as the Green Party candidate.
The first important point to consider is the Green New Deal is not a new concept. It began in 2006 in Europe, and was adopted as a platform position by the Green Party in both their 2012 and 2016 campaigns. The Green New Deal, having been endorsed by many of the prospective 2020 Democrat candidates now must be considered “mainstream policy” for the Democrat party. The same can be said for Medicare for All. Single-Payer health care used to be a policy of the progressive left. It was part of the Green Party's 2008 platform. Now it is fair to say it is also Democrat "mainstream policy". In 2006, after the Iraq War, but before the financial crisis, the progressive left at DailyKos declared themselves to be the "New Mainstream". It took over a decade, but it is fair to say the once fringe positions of the progressive left are increasingly mainstream policy of the Democrat party. With each broad endorsement of a formerly progressive left policy position, the Democrats' Overton Window shifts further left, opening the party up for evolution further left on policies such as "Abolish ICE."
The second important point to consider is it is the activist wing of a party who writes the official party platform. While a candidate does not need to run on the platform specifics, the platform specifics can be used a cudgel to keep candidates true to the party, or by the opposing party to paint the candidate as out of touch.
The third issue is the activist wing of the Democrat party is made up of the progressive left. Those who will volunteer to make phone calls and canvass door to door come from the activist left wing of the party. But even the non-active progressives can have an impact in the era of social media. A Biden or a Kobuchar will not get the same level of support in a general election a Sanders or Warren will. But there is a difference between holding one’s nose to support their candidate and feeling betrayed. Sanders supporters in 2016 felt Clinton and the DNC had wronged them. They would likely feel the same way about any Democrat who endorses the concept of “Medicare for All” and then retreats to anything less than full coverage at no cost to the patient.
That means the pressure on a progressive nominee to run a progressive general election campaign will be strong. However, that opens up erosion of some of the Democrat base to hard-left third party or independent candidates like Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016, but instead erosion to more centrist third-party or independent candidates like Howard Schultz. A very progressive nominee, like Sanders, would likely motivate Shultz to go ahead with his campaign. A Biden or Klobuchar nominee would likely cause Shultz to sit 2020 out. This is why I think Bill Weld made a serious error jumping from the Libertarian Party back to the GOP to try to primary Trump. If he does not want Trump to be reelected, primarying Trump is not the way to stop him. Also, a Bill Weld at the top of an arguably centrist third party with 50-state ballot access could have gained significant Democrat votes if the Democrats nominate a very progressive nominee. Instead, the LP is likely to return to sub 1% returns. A Sanders nomination could be another 1972 George McGovern lost cause. Mainstream Democrats might endorse Shultz in hopes he wins at least one state and there is no Electoral College majority, throwing the election to the House of Representatives. This is the same strategy Evan McMullin served to some on the right in 2016. But to those hard-left progressives, represented by the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress, anyone who strays from the fold will be seen as misguided, a traitor, or insane. In their insane society, the sane person appears insane.
This is the Democrats’ Dilemma: Nominate a centrist, and end up with another Hillary 2016 problem of lack of core support; nominate a progressive, have them shift to the center, and end up with another Hillary 2016 problem of lack of core support; or nominate a progressive, have them run as a progressive, gain core support, but risk being tarred as an out of touch extremist and invite a third-party or independent centrist run.
Much will come down to the general sanity of the electorate in 2020, as well as the sanity of the individual voter groups. It is fair to say, many saw themselves as Sane in 2016, and saw Trump and his strongest supporters as Insane. Likewise, many of Trump's strongest supporters saw themselves and Trump as the Sane ones, and the GOP establishment and the Democrats each as Insane in their own way. The difference is now the Insane, or the fringe, whichever you choose to call them, have much bigger megaphones than they have had in the past. You may think you are the Sane one, and the voices on Twitter and Facebook are the Insane ones. But they think they are the Sane ones, and you are the Insane one.
Welcome to Harvey Holroyd's world. We are all in 1979 Marin County now.
[4/15: Updated to add Eric Swalwell's candidacy
[4/15: Updated to add comments on Pete Buttigieg]
[4/15: Updated to add comments on Andrew Yang]
[4/22: Updated to add Seth Moulton's candidacy]
[5/15: Updated to add Steve Bullock's and Michael Bennet's candidacies]
[5/16: Updated to add Bill de Blasio's candidacy]
Back in 1980, an excellent comedy on Marin County California, starring Martin Mull was released. It was called “Serial”, based on the original novel which was serialized in a Marin County alternative weekly newspaper before being published as a book.
The movie was not successful in theatrical release, but found more following once it made its way to premium cable channels such as HBO.
Near the end of the move, one of the secondary characters, Stokeley, a young teenage boy, checks on Martin Mull’s character, protagonist Harvey Holroyd, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Stokeley says to Harvey: "In an insane society the sane man must appear insane" to point out that Harvey was indeed the sane person in the insane society that was Marin County. Harvey asked Stokeley where he got that from, and Stokeley replies “Star Trek”. However, like Jules Winnfield’s infamous bible quote in Pulp Fiction, Stokeley’s Star Trek quote was not real. That line was never said in any Star Trek episode.
I recently divided the list of Democrat presidential candidates into a “Sane” and “Insane” group. Nothing against Democrats, one could do the same for the Republican party. The thing is, right now, like the GOP in 2016, the Democrats have a lot of presidential primary candidates.
By “Sane”, I mean center-left candidates who are careful to avoid being tagged as “extremist” or “radical” and are avoiding wholesale endorsement of popular, but hard to implement, proposals. By “Insane”, I mean progressive-left candidates who are eager to claim the progressive mantle, and are either offering, or endorsement popular, but hard to implement proposals.
The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Free College for All, $15 Minimum Wage, UBI, Jobs Guarantee, etc., endorsing multiple of these policies qualifies a candidate for the “Insane” tag. Distancing oneself from multiple of these policies qualifies a candidate for the “Sane” tag.
To dive deeper on this, consider Medicare for All. Medicare today comprises several parts. The original Medicare, Part A, is hospitalization only. What today we would call “catastrophic coverage”. Part A is either “earned” by working the equivalent of at least 10 years full time (or through a spouse who has done so). Otherwise, one must pay a premium to be insured under Part A. Everyone must pay a premium for Part B, which covers non-hospital physician visits. The premium is automatically deducted from Social Security pension payments. Everyone must pay a premium for Part D, which covers non-hospital prescription drugs. All three parts have deductibles and copays, which can be partially covered by enrolling in private Medicare supplement plans.
However, when most people hear “Medicare for All”, and indeed when most politicians promote “Medicare for All”, they are not speaking of a program of basic hospitalization insurance with additional premiums required for doctors’ visits, and optional private supplements. Instead, they are speaking of a program with no earned eligibility requirements and no premiums. While Medicare requires one to work and be a taxpayer, Medicare for All would cover all regardless of work status. Additionally, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Nancy Pelosi publicly stated her desire to get rid of copays, deductibles, and coinsurance. In addition, many progressive politicians are demanding coverage for vision, dental, and long-term care be included. Indeed, the current Medicare for All bill from Representative Pramila Jayapal would cover standard health care along with vision, dental, and substance-abuse care, and would not charge patients copays, or have deductibles.
Part of the problem with the original ACA was it was larded up with additional coverages, which increased the price for policies. But the lessons of why the ACA has failed to deliver have not been learned. Indeed, they have not even been investigated.
Some have proposed a universal, government paid for catastrophic coverage, similar to Medicare Part A, and then leverage employers and the ACA Exchange for general health insurance, which would solve the “Medical Bankruptcy” problem, but this flies against the demands of progressives.
The cost of a “Medicare for All” with full coverage at no cost to the patient is Insanely high. Bernie Sanders proposal of a few years ago was estimated to cost $32 trillion over 10 years. Those candidates who are looking at something less are trying to be Sane.
Likewise, the cost of the “Green New Deal” is Insanely high. One group estimated it at $93 trillion over ten years. This included $32 trillion for Medicare for All, which is included with the Green New Deal proposal, so the rest would be about $60 trillion. Others have discounted that estimate, but I did a simple estimate and came up with over $30 trillion just for changes to electrical power generation and changes needed convert homes to all-electric fuel, with no consideration to changes to commercial building, mass transit, or long-distance travel. When one adds in proposals like college loan debt forgiveness, and broader health care coverage beyond Sanders original plan, one can easily begin to approach $100 trillion over 10 years. The 2019 U.S. federal budget is $4.4 trillion. Even with the savings some of these programs would produce, it is not unreasonable to suggest it would require a doubling of the current annual budget, which is fiscally impossible. Or, to put it another way, it is Insane.
Then there is the Insane idea of amending the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College. First, that would never pass. An amendment requires a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the states, the very states which would lose their clout in such a change. Never mind the organizational nightmare a single national vote to a single national standard would create compared to 51 discrete federal votes under 51 state and district standards.
And the Insane idea of amending the Constitution to allow 16 year olds to vote. Many of the Democrats advocating for a 16 year old vote also advocated for 26 year old "children" to be covered by their parent's health insurance, and "children" under 21 to be restricted from purchasing tobacco and firearms. These same people have trotted out evidence a young man's brain has not completed development until age 25 to advocate for lesser criminal sentencing for those under the age of 25. If someone is responsible enough vote at age 16, one would think they are responsible enough to own a firearm--after all, government has access armed to force: police, military, etc.
Here is my list of Democrat candidates for president, and where they rate. I will explain some of my ratings after this list.
Sane (Generally Avoiding Full Support of the Most Controversial Policies)
Michael Bennet
Joe Biden
John Delaney
Amy Klobuchar
Seth Moulton
Tim Ryan
In Between Sane and Insane
Pete Buttigieg (Publicly Sane, Policy both Sane and Insane)
John Hickenlooper (Publicly Insane, Policy Sane)
Jay Inslee (Single-Issue, Policy Conflicted)
Insane (Supporting Multiple Controversial Policies)
Cory Booker
Steve Bullock
Julian Castro
Bill de Blasio
Tulsi Gabbard
Kirsten Gillibrand
Mike Gravel
Kamala Harris
Wayne Messam
Beto O'Rourke
Bernie Sanders
Eric Swalwell
Elizabeth Warren
Marianne Williamson
Andrew Yang
The reality is, as the Democrats’ Overton Window has shifted left, the center-left “Sane” candidates look increasingly like outsiders, or “Insane”. While the more radical, or “Insane” candidates, look “Sane”.
The same thing happened in 2016, as Trump began as clearly an “Insane” candidate, and by the end John Kasich looked positively nuts, refusing to drop out and babbling about his mailman father like Commander Queeg talking about strawberries. Indeed other “Sane” candidates, like Marco Rubio, tried to do the same “Insane” stunts as Trump, like making comparisons about hand size, or making insults. Bobby Jindal, arguably a “Sane” candidate, and the son of immigrants, stated “Immigration without assimilation is an invasion” to boost his strong border bona fides.
I expect we will see similar for the Democrats this time. Joe Biden, who in polling has the strongest chance to beat Trump, in large part because of his moderate history, is tacking left, and trying to position himself as “Woke”, to the point of disparaging the entire concept of British Common Law, in large part because it was created by “White Men”. British Common Law, along with Roman/Germanic/Napoleonic Civil Law (also created by “White Men”), undergirds the vast majority of the world’s legal system. Also, Biden is under coordinated attack to paint him as a sexual predator in order to bring down his candidacy.
Pete Buttigieg’s intersectional identity politic credentials are being debated. And he has tacked increasingly left. Buttigieg arguably is using his midwestern small-city mayor credentials to stake a claim in the “Sane” camp. Just this morning, on a local radio station, I heard a talk show host comment on Buttigieg and she said: “He sounds sane. He sounds moderate.” In other words, she also sees the Sane vs. Insane stratification, and considers “moderate” to be synonymous with “sane”. In other words, it is not just my opinion.
Update 4/15: Pete Buttigieg's position on college financial aid and college debt is Sane, very similar to Amy Klobuchar's proposals. This is a really big deal because Buttigieg announced it at the same time as he announced his official candidacy, and it represents a visible and significant shift away from the progressive edge. However, I would note, no Democrat nor Republican candidate has proposed any policy which would actually reduce the costs of college. The reality is the Educational-Political Complex has subsumed higher education, and has enormous political power to prevent such policies. Instead it rent-seeks via government grants and government guaranteed loans. Despite Buttigieg's Saneness on college funding, he continues to advocate for the quixotic idea of eliminating the Electoral College. For this reason, he remains in the "In Between Sane and Insane" camp.
Andrew Yang can sanely defend his UBI proposal, and indeed a UBI may be necessary at some point in the future, but in a period of historic low U3 unemployment and rising wages, now is clearly not the time. Yang increasingly is promoting his UBI in a way that seems less a serious national economic proposal, and more a tactical vote buying strategy. In addition, Yang has weighed in on the infant circumcision debate, which seems unpresidential. Just today Yang announced a new, critical policy position: Make Daylight Savings Time permanent. This is not serious.
Update 4/15: Andrew Yang has made some very Sane proposals along with his many Insane proposals. He may shift in the future to the "In Between Sane and Insane" group not because he is moderate in most positions, but because of the balance between his various positions. Yang appears to be courting controversy to gain publicity. A kind of "Trump from the Mirror Universe" approach (staying with the Star Trek theme of this post).
Jay Inslee is running on the single issue of Climate Change, and has endorsed the Green New Deal. One should always be cautious of single-issue candidates. Inslee is the governor of Washington state, which is home to Boeing, manufacturer of half of the jetliners used on planet Earth, and jet aircraft are one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses. Inslee has ushered tax deals to Boeing, and defended Boeing’s Washington jobs from loss to South Carolina and Kansas. Beyond the Green New Deal, Inslee’s book on battling Climate Change is dismissive of nuclear energy and puts too much confidence in solar and wind power. Other than his single-issue push Inslee is making a point to sound moderate by staking a claim against certain popular Democrat policy positions. However, Inslee’s simultaneous support the Green New Deal and the jetliner industry means Inslee is either a hypocrite or insane.
John Hickenlooper’s bizarre story about taking his mother to see “Deep Throat” puts his carefully crafted “Sane” credentials at risk.
Update 4/15: Eric Swalwell has announced his candidacy. He has a single-issue focus, in his case, on gun control. Based on Swalwell's Insane Twitter comments about attacking legal gun owners with nuclear weapons, he starts solidly in the Insane camp.
Update 4/22: Seth Moulton has announced his candidacy. Moulton has expressed full support for the Green New Deal, but is not in the Medicare for All camp, instead he only proposes to add a "Public Option" to the current Affordable Care Act. He also has not endorsed free college for all or student loan debt forgiveness. He is mostly Sane, and he should provide more detail on what his support of the Green New Deal actually means. Because he is avoiding Insane positions on health care and education, he starts in the Sane camp.
Update 5/15: Steve Bullock and Michael Bennet have announced their candidacies. Bullock is running as a single-issue candidate on campaign finance reform. I automatically put quixotic single-issue candidates in the Insane column because they are not serious candidates. Bennet is positioning himself as a rational centrist, albeit a milquetoast, undifferentiated centrist with no marque proposals. Bennet begins in the Sane camp.
Update 5/16: Bill de Blasio has announced his candidacy. This needs no explanation. Insane.
Big Money and Small Money, and how it tracks to Sane and Insane
In presidential politics, there are two sources of money: Big Money and Small Money. Big money is the large donors, corporations, PACs, etc. Small money is the grass roots individual donations. Generally, big money flows to “Sane” candidates. In 2016, the Democrats’ big money went to Clinton, while Sanders was the champion of small money. For the Republicans, the big money was split, and Trump was the beneficiary of small money. I believe the attacks on Biden are because he is seen as a threat in the big money space. Small money continues to be dominated by Sanders, although Beto O’Rourke had initial success with grass roots fundraising. If he can sustain it is another question. If Biden’s entry is blocked by sexual assault claims, the likely big money beneficiaries are Harris and Klobuchar. While I categorize Harris among the “Insane” for her public policy positions, she is likely to be seen as another Obama, a candidate with one public persona, and a different private persona. If any of the “old white men” (Biden, Delaney, Hickenlooper, or Inslee) gain traction, expect big money to flow their way. However, as soon as Harris is seen cavorting with big money donors, the progressive small donors will reject her.
Tack to the Left/Right in the Primary, Tack to the Center in the General Election
The ideas a Democrat primary candidate can run as a progressive in the primary and then run as a centrist in the general election, and a Republican primary candidate can run as a conservative in the primary and then a centrist in the general election, are long-proven paths. However, in the era of social media, that path may be obsolete. Part of the reason Hillary lost the general election to Trump is many of Sanders’ supporters refused to support Hillary. Some stayed home, some voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and some voted for Trump. Don’t forget Stein offered to step aside if Sanders would run as the Green Party candidate.
The first important point to consider is the Green New Deal is not a new concept. It began in 2006 in Europe, and was adopted as a platform position by the Green Party in both their 2012 and 2016 campaigns. The Green New Deal, having been endorsed by many of the prospective 2020 Democrat candidates now must be considered “mainstream policy” for the Democrat party. The same can be said for Medicare for All. Single-Payer health care used to be a policy of the progressive left. It was part of the Green Party's 2008 platform. Now it is fair to say it is also Democrat "mainstream policy". In 2006, after the Iraq War, but before the financial crisis, the progressive left at DailyKos declared themselves to be the "New Mainstream". It took over a decade, but it is fair to say the once fringe positions of the progressive left are increasingly mainstream policy of the Democrat party. With each broad endorsement of a formerly progressive left policy position, the Democrats' Overton Window shifts further left, opening the party up for evolution further left on policies such as "Abolish ICE."
The second important point to consider is it is the activist wing of a party who writes the official party platform. While a candidate does not need to run on the platform specifics, the platform specifics can be used a cudgel to keep candidates true to the party, or by the opposing party to paint the candidate as out of touch.
The third issue is the activist wing of the Democrat party is made up of the progressive left. Those who will volunteer to make phone calls and canvass door to door come from the activist left wing of the party. But even the non-active progressives can have an impact in the era of social media. A Biden or a Kobuchar will not get the same level of support in a general election a Sanders or Warren will. But there is a difference between holding one’s nose to support their candidate and feeling betrayed. Sanders supporters in 2016 felt Clinton and the DNC had wronged them. They would likely feel the same way about any Democrat who endorses the concept of “Medicare for All” and then retreats to anything less than full coverage at no cost to the patient.
That means the pressure on a progressive nominee to run a progressive general election campaign will be strong. However, that opens up erosion of some of the Democrat base to hard-left third party or independent candidates like Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016, but instead erosion to more centrist third-party or independent candidates like Howard Schultz. A very progressive nominee, like Sanders, would likely motivate Shultz to go ahead with his campaign. A Biden or Klobuchar nominee would likely cause Shultz to sit 2020 out. This is why I think Bill Weld made a serious error jumping from the Libertarian Party back to the GOP to try to primary Trump. If he does not want Trump to be reelected, primarying Trump is not the way to stop him. Also, a Bill Weld at the top of an arguably centrist third party with 50-state ballot access could have gained significant Democrat votes if the Democrats nominate a very progressive nominee. Instead, the LP is likely to return to sub 1% returns. A Sanders nomination could be another 1972 George McGovern lost cause. Mainstream Democrats might endorse Shultz in hopes he wins at least one state and there is no Electoral College majority, throwing the election to the House of Representatives. This is the same strategy Evan McMullin served to some on the right in 2016. But to those hard-left progressives, represented by the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress, anyone who strays from the fold will be seen as misguided, a traitor, or insane. In their insane society, the sane person appears insane.
This is the Democrats’ Dilemma: Nominate a centrist, and end up with another Hillary 2016 problem of lack of core support; nominate a progressive, have them shift to the center, and end up with another Hillary 2016 problem of lack of core support; or nominate a progressive, have them run as a progressive, gain core support, but risk being tarred as an out of touch extremist and invite a third-party or independent centrist run.
Much will come down to the general sanity of the electorate in 2020, as well as the sanity of the individual voter groups. It is fair to say, many saw themselves as Sane in 2016, and saw Trump and his strongest supporters as Insane. Likewise, many of Trump's strongest supporters saw themselves and Trump as the Sane ones, and the GOP establishment and the Democrats each as Insane in their own way. The difference is now the Insane, or the fringe, whichever you choose to call them, have much bigger megaphones than they have had in the past. You may think you are the Sane one, and the voices on Twitter and Facebook are the Insane ones. But they think they are the Sane ones, and you are the Insane one.
Welcome to Harvey Holroyd's world. We are all in 1979 Marin County now.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Humility
I recently saw the new documentary, “Apollo 11”. As the film
approached its conclusion there were two scenes that stood out. The first was
the last television broadcast from Apollo 11 prior to its reentry.
But rewind a moment. Neil Armstrong was the coolest of
cucumbers. A quiet, introverted man, he barely even smiled in candid
photographs. Look at this picture of him. This is Neil Armstrong upon his
return from his historic walk on the moon:
Look at the radiance, the glow emanating from him. The
weight of a nation, the world, lifted off of his shoulders. This was the first
time the man had relaxed in years. What should be elation was mere
satisfaction. The man had made history to a level beyond any human being in
modern history. The gravity of the moment was much more than 1/6th G.
Keep that in mind as we leap forward two days to that final
broadcast. You can see the original video here:
The film really cleaned up the video, but the content comes through
well on the YouTube video.
Listen to Mike Collins. List to how me makes his role, as
Command Module Pilot, seem small compared to the complexity of the Apollo
Command Module. Collins, as a Command Module Pilot, knew every inch of the Apollo
Command and Service Modules—none of it which he had any role in designing or
building:
“All of it made possible, by the blood, sweat, and tears of a number of people. The American workman, who put these pieces of machinery together in the factory.”
Collins goes on to thank many others including all of the people
in Mission Control.
A side note. As I continue to reflect on Apollo (which I
have done for 47 odd years), I have come to respect the Command Module Pilots immensely.
Rendezvous and docking is one of the most difficult spacecraft maneuvers, and
it was critical to the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous technique of Apollo. The CM
pilots were the unsung heroes of Apollo.
Buzz Aldrin speaks next, with his undeniably way of seeing
the profoundness of larger picture:
“We have come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men, on a voyage to the moon. More still, than the efforts of a government and industry team. More even than the efforts of one nation. We feel, this stands as a symbol, of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown.”
Aldrin at the time was deeply religious, and celebrated Holy
Communion, complete with wine and wafer, on the moon after the landing.
Finally Neil speaks. He looks different now. He has shaved,
his hair looks well combed even in Zero G. The euphoria is gone now, and he is
almost somber in his reflection. But it does not change the fact he is not
headed for splashdown, he is headed for the history books.
Neil knows he is standing on the shoulders of giants. Galileo, Newton. Then he thanks the American people, not for paying for this whole thing, but for “their will”. Neil specifically calls out the spacesuit manufacturer. If you know the story of the Apollo EVA spacesuit, you know it was sewn by seamstresses from the same company that made Playtex girdles and bras.
Neil knows he is standing on the shoulders of giants. Galileo, Newton. Then he thanks the American people, not for paying for this whole thing, but for “their will”. Neil specifically calls out the spacesuit manufacturer. If you know the story of the Apollo EVA spacesuit, you know it was sewn by seamstresses from the same company that made Playtex girdles and bras.
In the film, the filmmakers interpose the broadcast with
pictures of the many workers who were associated with Apollo. It damn near
brought me to tears.
But they didn’t stop there. When the Apollo 11 crew was
finally released from quarantine, they left the Airstream trailer to applauding
crowds of NASA workers. The film catches Neil stopping, and taking a step back
to a microphone. He thanks those workers for all they did. Neil had to
celebrate his 39th birthday as the “boy in the bubble”, but he
stopped to thank those NASA folks for keeping him prisoner. That is just outstanding
leadership. And a key component to outstanding leadership is humility.
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Armstrong might be
the most humble people in American history. They had every right to not be
humble, but they were, and have been.
Which brings me to my larger point. Humility used to be a
core value of being a human being in modern society. Bragging, or being audacious
was seen as bad behavior. At one time, young people knew and understood their place:
they may have youthful ambition but they lacked experience and wisdom so they deferred
to their elders. This was an important component of the mentor/apprentice relationship which defined work for centuries. This deference to humility, this idea the young or the new are in an apprentice role, a probationary position, has changed in
modern society. Instead the young and the new demand and are expected to be full members of an organization, complete with the right their opinions and ideas have equal weight to those from more experienced members. In some case the young and the new are granted veto authority. This philosophy now pervades politics.
It is interesting to watch an amazing IMAX documentary,
where people who literally wrote their names into the history of the human race
show incredible humility, and in the same week watch freshman members of Congress act with zero humility. Congress , like most legislative and parliamentary
systems, operates under the ultimate seniority system. If you have ever known
anyone who has served on a city council to U.S. Senate you understand this.
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska famously
waited 10 months before he even made a speech to the Senate. To watch these
freshman members of Congress act with arrogance was simply, disturbing. One was
born in 1976, one in 1981, and one in 1989. One is a “Xennial”, the other two
are Millennials. Unlike those born before them, they do not have respect for
authority or elders. They do not have respect for experience. They do not have
respect for wisdom. They do not have humility in any form whatsoever--in a role where humility should be paramount.
Humility is like empathy.
It is necessary. A person devoid of empathy has a term to describe them:
sociopath. A person devoid of humility has a term to describe them: narcissist.
This is bad. There can be no good that comes from someone
devoid of humility.
But instead, this lack of humility is being championed by
some.
Humility used to be “table stakes” of polite society. No
more. This should be a worry. This should be a concern. This should be
frightening.
If anyone earned the right to be braggadocios, it was the
crew of Apollo 11. There is a lesson there. We all can all learn from it.
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