Triangulation: Anil Dash

Anil Dash in discussion on Leo Laporte’s Triangulation programme.  He talks about blogging, the US government’s social media policies and how to go about lobbying government so that it can better understand and promote the internet / web, rather than attack it.  We could do with some of that in the UK too.

Radio: UK Confidential 1981

This is an annual series on BBC Radio 4  that looks at some of the newly released government papers from 1981 – they were previously secret and are now made available to the National Archive after the “30 year rule” has elapsed.  This series is always interesting, especially now as they are getting into an era that I remember.

The Prime Minster at the time – Margaret Thatcher –  is a person reviled by many, and the documents do not help improve that image.  Some of the issues highlighted in the programme include:

• she was personally involved in discussions with Irish terrorists despite misleading parliament and the country by saying that her government does not deal with terrorists.  This is a lie, pure and simple, although it is naive to make too much of an issue here as this is something that still occurs, and is just part of the political game

•  she had no issue with selling arms to despot regimes around the world – in particular the Pinochet regime in Chile – even though it was clear that they would be used to quell internal dissent.  Her argument was that it would be good for employment in Britain.  She was forceful, even bullish, in this regard

• during the Iran / Iraq war, Thatcher was urging arms sales to Iraq, and this included ministerial meetings with Saddam Hussein.  Steps were taken to avoid bad publicity by routing these arms via Jordan.  When minsters recommended that “lethal” armaments (eg ammunition) should not be supplied, she said that the definition of “lethal” should be as narrow as possible, so that Britain could bring in as much business as possible.

Perhaps the behaviour of dictators towards the UK and the West can be explained to some minor degree by the fact that  they have been in power for decades and remember the positions taken by previous administrations.  No doubt that there were many issues that our modern day governments don’t remember or would rather forget.   I’m sure it is convenient for some governments that certain secrets died along with Gaddafi and Hussein.

Another point that comes through loud and clear is that politics is a two-faced and corrupt battle of personalities, and politicians are in power for their own interests and advancement rather than the good of the people.  This was the case then, it is the case now and no doubt always will be.  No wonder that people are protesting in the streets at what the politicians are doing and what they have allowed to occur.  It’s sickening.

A final point is that Margret Thatcher should not be remembered as she is portrayed by a Hollywood superstar in some biographical film. I have not seen “The Iron Lady” yet, so I can’t comment fully, but it should be the image of the lady that is portrayed in this radio programme that should be recognised as the truth.  It is not pretty.

I look forward to coming years of the programme, but now won’t be surprised if I get so enraged that I simply have to sit down and write about my feelings.  That is what inspired this post.

* The National Archive:  Newly released files from 1981

Radio: China’s Migrant Worker Mega-City

An excellent BBC Radio 4 programme about the impact on Chinese economic migrants of the Hukou ‘class system’ residency permits in their country. The permit states that a person is officially from a particular region, and this has had a major impact on migrant workers when they move to a city.  Not being a local means that you are denied state help to pay for education for your children or medical care if you become ill.

This has resulted in strikes and riots by migrants who believe that they are not sharing in the wealth they are helping to create.  China’s economic rise has been based on the availability of cheap labour migrating from towns and villages to work in urban factories, so the country’s prosperity relies on the very people that are being targeted.

The programme focuses on the megacity of Guangzhou – with a population of nearly 13 million people.  Thinking more broadly than just China, as more of these urban areas emerge, both regional and / or national governments are going to have to bear in mind that when they are dealing with policies that discriminate (even unintentionally) they risk alienating huge numbers of people.  In today’s world, unrest will soon follow.

• BBC Radio 4: Crossing Continents – China’s Migrant Worker Mega-City

Mini review: The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future

 

This book looks at the impact that exponential technological advance will have on the economy, in particular when automation reaches a sufficient level that it eliminates the bulk of routine jobs and leads to mass unemployment.

Good points:

• The analogy that the author uses to explain how he says the economy would change over time is a good one – simple, clear and effective.  These are the lights in the tunnel, as mentioned in the book’s title.

• There is an attempt to look beyond simply describing the problem.  Ford looks at some possible steps that could be taken to allow the economy to continue functioning even when unemployment reaches very high levels.  This is brave, especially as the steps sound implausible or unworkable.  When you think about it, there is nothing wrong with the steps themselves, it’s just that we have never needed to think in this way before. We have never faced this situation before.  If the policies are hindered by anything, it will be political inertia or a desire to keep some sections of the voting populace happy.  These policies have to manage the whole of a domestic economy, not  just certain entrenched interests.

Bad points:

•  The writing itself undermines the points the author is making.  There is far too much repetition and referring to points that have already been made. For me, the biggest problem is the massive overuse of the word “obviously.” It is used occasionally where the points are obvious, but most of the time a point is “obvious” simply because it has already been dealt with.  Obviously, this can become highly annoying.  If the author tidies up the text in some new edition of the book, it could appeal more to a broader audience.  A good way to avoid the style issues is to start reading the appendices first – these give a good, concise overview of the points being made in the main text.

Overall, if you are interested in the subject, this is definitely the book to read.  If you want an intro to the subject, you could try Race Against The Machine first.  It is better written and can be read in an evening, but it does not propose steps to deal with the issues.  Both books have Kindle versions that are under £3 – a small price for big ideas.

• The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (also offers a free PDF version of the book, but the font used makes it difficult to read.)

• econfuture | Future Economics and Technology – Dispatches from the Economic Landscape of the Coming Decades (the author’s blog.)

Circling Amazon

I’m loving my Kindle at the moment, especially as I’ve found an easy way to get content on there.  Readability is a browser extension that does a good job of saving a list of any articles that you want to read later.  Once you are done, go to their site and you can send the articles to your Kindle.  There are also bookmarklets if you don’t want to install any plugins.  So far, the articles have come through very well formatted, and with all pictures.  This definitely beats stripping out the text and emailing it to yourself…

I’m also enjoying short stories and some digital exclusives such as Facts are Sacred: The power of data (Guardian Shorts).  Digital publishing is here to stay, but it is still early days.

Amazon does seem to be pushing the boundaries at the moment, and ruffling some feathers.  I think that 2012 will see it attract more attention (ie criticism) as people really come to terms with its position in retailing and web services.  It is up there with Google, Apple, and Facebook – and at that level there is no escaping inspection.  As a company it has great ambition and the willingness to focus on the long term.

Interesting times…

IBM’s Next 5 in 5: 2011

Mini review: Nikita

Wow.  Godamn wow.

This was the first French film that blew me away.  I’d never seen anything like it.

I watched it again today.  What a ride…

Not Luc Besson’s best film (that was to come with Leon.)

But not to be missed.

 

A new Great Depression?

An excellent article from Vanity Fair comparing the current economic mess to the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. One of the arguments is that the economy was weak even before the recession, but this was masked by the property boom.  Do we need government spending cuts or investment in the country’s people and infrastructure?  It raises the question – are we already going down the wrong path?

A must read.

• Vanity Fair:  Joseph Stiglitz: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around”

Excerpts:

For a time, the bubbles in the housing and lending markets concealed the problem by creating artificial demand, which in turn created jobs in the financial sector and in construction and elsewhere. The bubble even made workers forget that their incomes were declining. They savored the possibility of wealth beyond their dreams, as the value of their houses soared and the value of their pensions, invested in the stock market, seemed to be doing likewise. But the jobs were temporary, fueled on vapor.

Of four major service sectors—finance, real estate, health, and education—the first two were bloated before the current crisis set in.

As in 1937, deficit hawks today call for balanced budgets and more and more cutbacks. Instead of pushing forward a structural transition that is inevitable—instead of investing in the right kinds of human capital, technology, and infrastructure, which will eventually pull us where we need to be—the government is holding back. Current strategies can have only one outcome: they will ensure that the Long Slump will be longer and deeper than it ever needed to be.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this brief history. The first is that the economy will not bounce back on its own, at least not in a time frame that matters to ordinary people… Monetary policy is not going to help us out of this mess….

…anyone who believes that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one.

What we need to do instead is embark on a massive investment program—as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago—that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now.

Public investments could be directed at improving the quality of life and real productivity—unlike the private-sector investments in financial innovations, which turned out to be more akin to financial weapons of mass destruction.

The second conclusion is this: If we expect to maintain any semblance of “normality,” we must fix the financial system.

…the implosion of the financial sector may not have been the underlying cause of our current crisis—but it has made it worse, and it’s an obstacle to long-term recovery.

…we have poured money into the banks, without restrictions, without conditions, and without a vision of the kind of banking system we want and need.

 

 

Review: Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

I’m starting with the bottom line.  If you are in any way interested in Apple or Steve Jobs, then this is the book to read.  There will  never be another that had access to the subject in the same way – it won’t get better than this.  There are so many great stories and you discover a lot:

• his ability to berate and insult people

• his extremely petulant behaviour, and the ability to suddenly burst into tears

• he had no problems abandoning friends when it suited him (not to mention his first daughter)

• his relationship with John Sculley, and the background story of Steve leaving Apple

• his long term relationship with Bill Gates

• the story of the 1984 commercial and the lack of success of the first Mac

• the evolution of the iPod, iPhone and iPad

• the Pixar story, and the relationship with Disney

• his long battle with cancer and how it affected his relationships

Especially as you get closer to the present day, it is revealing to hear the real details behind the stories we have been told.  It’s increasingly sad, as you know the end is approaching fast, and ultimately he is as human as anyone else.

A couple of little negatives: the book can get a bit repetitive – as if the chapters were meant to be self-contained and mentioning things again rather than relying on the reader’s memory.  You could make a drinking game out of hearing the term “reality distortion field” – getting nicely sozzled along the away.   Also, just at the end, Jobs is given too much credit for the coming of cloud computing, when he wasn’t a pioneer in any other way than he made very nice internet-enabled devices.  It’s a shame, as otherwise I thought it was a well balanced book.

Finally, a note to say that I read the audiobook version – an excellent way of getting through 600+ pages / 24 hours + of material.  It is well read, if not earth-shatteringly amazing.

Overall, a great book on a great (if imperfect) life.

Mini Review: Race Against The Machine

I came about this book in a rather convoluted way. The Amazon page for What Technology Wants recommended a book called Lights at the End of the Tunnel, and when I checked that out there was a link to an article in the New York Times featuring this new e-book about how technology will affect employment and the economy, both now and in the future.

Lights at the End of the Tunnel seems to be the main book on the subject, but I found Race Against the Machine to be a good introduction to the idea.  It’s a straight forward and interesting read, that can be finished in an evening.  A bargain at under £3.

One criticism: the authors finish on a vague positive note, which detracts from the argument that they are making – convincingly – in the rest of the book.  I guess they did not want to be portrayed as unremiting doom-mongers on the subject.

Also see:

• The Observer:  Middle class may see US-style income stagnation, warns White House economist

• The Observer:  What Britain must learn from the misfortunes of middle America

• Washington Post: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs to beaten-down towns

Here are my Kindle highlights / clippings for Race Against The Machine:

We don’t believe in the coming obsolescence of all human workers. In fact, some human skills are more valuable than ever, even in an age of incredibly powerful and capable digital technologies. But other skills have become worthless, and people who hold the wrong ones now find that they have little to offer employers. They’re losing the race against the machine, a fact reflected in today’s employment statistics.

And computers (hardware, software, and networks) are only going to get more powerful and capable in the future, and have an ever-bigger impact on jobs, skills, and the economy.

The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring. Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind. So it’s urgent that we understand these phenomena, discuss their implications, and come up with strategies that allow human workers to race ahead with machines instead of racing against them.

We can’t win that race, especially as computers continue to become more powerful and capable. But we can learn to better race with machines, using them as allies rather than adversaries.

“Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”

Whatever else computers may be at present, they are not yet convincingly human.

When you consider that the overall population has grown, the lack of job creation is even more troubling.

Lack of hiring, rather than increases in layoffs, is what accounts for most of the current joblessness.

Employers just don’t seem to have the same demand for labor that they once did.

Historically, increased output meant increased employment, but the recent recovery created much less employment than predicted; GDP rebounded but jobs didn’t.

The historically strong relationship between changes in GDP and changes in employment appears to have weakened as digital technology has become more pervasive and powerful.

For over 200 years, the economists were right. Despite massive automation of millions of jobs, more Americans had jobs at the end of each decade up through the end of the 20th century. However, this empirical fact conceals a dirty secret. There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

…technological progress is not a rising tide that automatically raises all incomes.

…wage divergence accelerated in the digital era.

According to economist Emmanuel Saez, the top 1% of U.S. households got 65% of all the growth in the economy since 2002. In fact, Saez reports that the top 0.01% of households in the United States—that is, the 14,588 families with income above $11,477,000—saw their share of national income double from 3% to 6% between 1995 and 2007.

… corporate profits have easily surpassed their pre-recession levels.

… corporate profits as a share of GDP are at 50-year highs. Meanwhile, compensation to labor in all forms, including wages and benefits, is at a 50-year low.

Technology has advanced rapidly, and the good news is that this has radically increased the economy’s productive capacity. However, technological progress does not automatically benefit everyone in a society.

… humans will eventually lose the head-to-head race against the machine.

Fortunately, humans are strongest exactly where computers are weak, creating a potentially beautiful partnership.

Smart entrepreneurs can, and will, invent ways to create value by employing even less skilled workers.

When significant numbers of people see their standards of living fall despite an ever-growing economic pie, it threatens the social contract of the economy and even the social fabric of society.

As digital technologies make markets and businesses more efficient, they benefit all of us as consumers. As they increase government transparency and accountability and give us new ways to assemble and make our voices heard, they benefit us as citizens. And as they put us in touch with ideas, knowledge, friends, and loved ones, they benefit us as human beings.