“Nobody ever asked why Steve Jobs kept working after he was rich. Everyone understood.”
– Virginia Postrel, writing about the computer entrepreneur and business visionary, who died yesterday.
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Peter Thiel, the founding CEO of PayPal, has an essay up that makes the contention that the pace of technological innovation in the West, for various reasons, has slowed. He argues that this paradoxically may explain why, in the absence of serious tech change, investors are instead drawn to the dangerous finangling of asset markets such as property, and have fallen prey to the easy charms of high leverage. It is quite an interesting idea. Here is an interesting couple of paragraphs:
It does rather go against the ideas of Matt Ridley about whom Brian Micklethwait writes below on this blog. Ridley’s take on the pace of events is far more optimistic: he does not, for instance, share the gloomy outlook on food production that Thiel makes. This rather gloomy “are the easy economic gains gone for good?” theme was also made recently in the Tyler Cowen book, called The Great Stagnation. Here is a somewhat critical review by Brink Lindsey. Dale Halling, an entrepreneur and scourge of things such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and anti-patent campaigners, has his own take on why the pace of innovation in the US may have slowed. I can see why a certain gloom might set in. Many of the innovations we see today, especially in things such as consumer electronics and mobile phones, don’t have the majestic appeal of a space rocket, tall building or breakthrough in medicine. But these things are continuing: materials science, for example, which is an area that is not very “sexy” (to use one of my least favourite epithets) is full of innovation. And there are the developments in biotech and nanotechnology, to take other cases. And let’s not forget that even in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, some people claimed that all that could be invented had been. And here is another example of the sort of concern that gets aired about where all the big inventions have gone, taken from The Money Illusion blog:
The worry is, of course, that in a world of low innovation and weak genuine economic growth, political fighting over the economic pie becomes nastier, and certain groups find life becomes very uncomfortable. Not a happy thought. October 4th, 2011 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have been following news on China’s supposed near monopoly on rare earth elements for some time now and reports like this one seem to bear out my opinion that things will settle out quickly. There are other projects around the world which can produce these important high technology elements. They have only been kept out of production because the Chinese were selling at prices lower than Western production could support. So the good news is, we got materials at low prices from the Chinese for years and created new wealth from them. And the other good news is, their attempt to extract a windfall profit is likely to fall on its face. And even better news is that one of the important new mines will be in Nebraska so even if the National Socialist Republic of California pushes prices from the old mines there into a range that keeps them closed, we will still be pulling them out of the ground in one of the Free States. September 24th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Friedman (son of Milton F.) has a good post here in which he asks the question of why we don’t focus more on the possible positive impacts of man-made global warming, rather than always focus on the bads. If you live in Siberia or have endured the winters of Canada, the idea of a bit more warmth will, well, warm your heart. And assuming the net impact of AGW is to leave more people with climates that have positives, such as longer growing seasons, fewer deaths from cold, etc, then surely this is a good thing? I remember Bjorn Lomborg, in his book, Cool It, looking at how many people die every year from cold and comparing that with current deaths from extreme heat and projected deaths from more heat. The good thing about the way David Friedman poses this question is that he is not taking a view on whether AGW is bunk or not. Rather, he is saying that assuming X or Y is happening, we need to weigh the positive impacts as well as the bads before deciding on the right response. Of course, from a cynical point of view, the reason the bad effects of AGW get so much attention is because it is more fun for grant-seeking scientists and journalists looking for a good story to play up disaster. Greater crop yields in northern Canada don’t sell newspapers. Thanks to EconLog for the pointer to the Friedman piece. September 14th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
At a time when what are called “rare earths” – key ingredients in many of our high-tech goods – are becoming, well, rarer and more costly, here is an interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how firms are looking to do without such metals via the use of substitutes. Substitution of one substance of nature for another, coupled with processes of minaturisation and use of smaller, lighter materials, is helping to deal with the supposed nightmare of how we are all running out of stuff. At this point, I must make my standard plug for that wonderful book, The Ultimate Resource, by Julian L Simon, and here also is the recently published and excellent The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley. As Brian Micklethwait notes below in his piece about a Kevin Dowd speech, we are likely heading for serious trouble on the monetary front. All the more reason, therefore, to bang on about the continued creativity and adaptability of people working in free markets. By the way, on the subject of rare earths, a good person to follow is libertarian blogger Tim Worstall, who makes a living from this area. September 13th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Brief History of the Age of Steam: The Power That Drove The Industrial Revolution The best thing about this book from my British point of view is that it does not focus only on British events and circumstances. It surveys the entire world, as best it can in the space it allows itself. In most other stuff I can recall reading about the history of the steam engine, Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick, the British pioneers of steam engines during the eighteenth century (Trevithick being the first to build a steam engine that propelled itself along a track – in other words the maker of the first locomotive), are followed immediately by the heroic deeds of George Stephenson and IK Brunel, the mighty British railway pioneers of the Victorian age. Foreign places get mentioned because Stephenson’s son did railways in them. Steamships are mentioned because Brunel also did them. But before you know it, you are being told about streamlined steam locos breaking speed records by hurtling from London to Scotland in the nineteen twenties and thirties, which was all good stuff but hardly central to the history of steam technology. By then, steam locomotives were a mature technology and soon to be an obsolete one. In this book, by contrast, the steam engine arrives at its early nineteenth century state, but then the scene switches from Britain to North America. Steam engines, being still very heavy, made sense as the engines of big river boats on big American rivers well before they made sense as small locomotives on railway lines less than five feet apart. The USA, unlike Britain, has an abundance of huge rivers, in exactly the parts of the USA that were then developing most rapidly. The next chapter then concerns itself with rivers and canals (the two often being rather hard to distinguish) elsewhere in the world, most notably in central Europe, in particular in the form of the Rhine and its many reconstructions and appendages. But already, I am getting ahead of the story. The first big job performed by steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines, the market that Newcomen catered to (1712 being the date of Newcomen’s first installation), and then the one in which James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton also got their start. Until Newcomen made his engine, many a British coal mine would have to cease operating, not because the coal had run out but because the coal that remained, often in large quantities, was under water. Any kind of mechanically powered pump, however expensive and inefficient, could make itself useful in circumstances like that, a classic niche market of just the kind that a cumbersome but clearly important new technology needs to get started. Thomas Crump (and yes, that is a rather Victorian sounding name, isn’t it?) does not make anything of the comparison, but the similarity between the early steam engines and the computers of our own time will strike anyone who reads this book. Steam engines started big and cumbersome. Then they got smaller and more powerful, thanks to a succession of technical innovations, and thanks to a general rise in engineering savvy and all-round craftsmanship. Not that this steam engine/computer parallel won’t have occurred to Crump. It’s merely that this book is published as one of a series called “A Brief History of …”, and you often sense, sometimes because Crump comes right out and says it, that lots of interesting stuff is being left out. → Continue reading: The age of steam powered transport August 25th, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I see that overnight, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple – now the largest firm in the US by market capitalisation – has resigned. His health has been a worry for many months and this announcement should come as a surprise to few. Even so, it represents something of a moment in the industry. Of course, the usual “dog in the manger” types will say that many others must claim credit for certain things, etc, etc, and they will have a point, as they do. Even so, given that entrepreneurship represents the only real way debt-laden countries can and will pull themselves out of their problems, it sometimes surprises me how, even in libertarian forums, the real-world business leaders we have attract as much bile as they do. And I am not talking about those who obviously benefit from corporate welfare, such as beneficiaries from tariffs, subsidies, eminent domain rulings, and the like. Even the more obviously free marketeer businessmen seem to get it in the neck from us. Perhaps we ought to step back a bit and realise that if this was so easy, why haven’t we achieved such success? Perhaps that is a painful question too far. August 25th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
A year ago I wrote about the Chinese monopoly position in Rare Earths and how unlikely it was to last. It seems I was correct, according to this item Glenn Reynolds linked to today:
And the best part of it? The deposits are not in California! August 5th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
It would seem that the government is about to amend copyright laws, so that it will be legal to “format shift” recorded music that you have legally bought to a different format. For instance, people will now be able to legally copy the music on a CD to their PC, or perhaps to an iPod or the music player of a mobile phone. Ignoring for the moment the absurdity of the idea that government and a bunch of lobbyist lawyers could actually lead anyone anywhere, I am struck by the thought that the people such an amendment might have been most helpful to in 1997 were those in the music industry itself, which spent the best part of another decade attempting to preserve their existing business model of reselling people the same music over and over again every time there was a technology change. (As late as 2003, I heard an interview in which one such person stated that if the rampant piracy problem could not be solved, then the internet would simply have to be closed down. Alas, I didn’t preserve the details for posterity). If the music industry had actually been willing to acknowledge that there was a complete paradigm shift underway a little earlier, then it might have done slightly less badly out of it. Or at least, it might have managed to avoid becoming Steve Jobs’ bitch, as ultimately happened. Although another way of looking at it is that the industry managed somehow to find a fate that it actually deserved. August 3rd, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The good news: those polars bears killed by “global warming,” were not. From the AP:
Bad news for some, I reckon. July 28th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rob Fisher, fellow Transport Blogger and a favourite blogger of mine generally, has a posting up at his personal blog about the coming-real-soon-now Asus Padfone. Instead of each of us having a phone and a computer with a screen, this gizmo will combine the two. When you want a phone, you use the phone. When you want a computer, you shove the phone into the screen. The central point being that phones are now big enough and serious computers are now small enough, for a phone to contain a serious computer.
Well, I don’t know about that “only needed for high end games and serious number crunching” bit, but in principle this has to be right. Maybe not now, but any year now. Asus has form (as in good form) for spotting when something has got small enough to be seriously different. A while back, they lead the world into genuinely portable and genuinely cheap computers, with the Asus Eee PC. I got one. At first I liked it, but eventually I got fed up with its geek-friendly but human-hostile operating system and with its just-too-small keyboard, so I sold it on to a geek child, and got a proper netbook with a proper operating system that I was able to work properly (not least because it was identical to the one on my big old home computer). Even so, despite my eventual disappointment with this Asus offering, I always liked and still like what it was trying to do. This Asus Padfone immediately started ringing the same bells in my head. It looks like this Padfone, or something very similar, could be the natural successor to that netbook of mine, and to my regular phone, and to my ridiculously antique mobile phone, and to my Filofax, and even, in the fullness of time, to my big old home computer. Microsoft look out. Google really is taking over the world. Asus also understands that low prices cause a lot more people to become interested in whatever it is. If this thing is as cheap as I hope it is, that will hurry things along, just like the ultra-cheap Eee PC did. I will probably be holding off this time, waiting for others to respond with their versions of the same thing, and even then it may not really suit me. However, next time I meet Rob I will definitely be cross-examining him about this latest triumph of consumer capitalism. Despite all the financial chaos, they just keep on coming, don’t they? Why can’t schools, hospitals and, above all, banks be like this, getting more effective and cheaper and just all-round nicer with every year that goes by? Well, we know why. The rules for making these latter things should be a lot like the rules for making Padfones: make a Padfone if you want to and sell it to whoever will pay you what you ask. If you go bust, that’s your problem. The rules for schools and hospitals and, above all, banks are instead sadly different. There are several other recent postings up at Rob’s Blog, and I recommend all readers here to have a scroll down there, if they haven’t already done this recently. July 19th, 2011 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
While some of its members may genuinely believe they are doing good by their fellow human beings in protecting health and potentially dangerous things, as they think genetically modified plants to be, the dangers of the Precautionary Principle are highlighted to a stark degree by the activities of Greenpeace activists in Canberra, Australia. According to a report, trials in producing GM wheat have been badly damaged. The persons who did this will, hopefully, be caught and punished with the full weight of the law. Remember, if these guys had their way, the Agricultural Revolution that took place in the decades leading up to the Industrial Revolution might not have happened, or at least to the same degree. Here is an article by the excellent Ronald Bailey on the GM crops issue. July 18th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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