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Often the connection between innovation, be it in science, engineering, medicine, music - or thinking around political and other organizational behavior – and actual economics and politics is understated. Commentators pay lip service to the advancement of knowledge, the development of new products, taking them to market (or otherwise delivering them to the people who need them) and modernizing ways that, while valuable once, just aren’t up to specs (slavery and chattel treatment of women, for example, being examples of obsolete “political technology”).
I use this term “technology” generically because these concepts are as important as drivers of progress as electricity, the wheel, the invention of fire-making itself. They are tools. Voting is a tool. The concept that all men (later, all people) are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights is another. In more pecuniary realms, the concept of the 30-year mortgage for residential real estate, sold on a mass market is quite a change from past practices...we take its existence for granted now (grumping that it is so poorly executed so often lately) that we overlook that once upon a time this.. technology.. was a pipe dream.
Now, comes the retort – that perhaps it should have been given the paltry state of regulation, of credit risk analysis of the absence (or obsolescence ) of the tools in place to make sure Really Sick and Wrong Crap Does Not Happen. Well, replacing sad practices with new ones (not without risk, mind you) is what empiricism is about.
These days, there are many discussions around public finances – how they should be spend (or spending cut back), where we should be shoring up obvious weakness (regulate the financial sector more closely or give them even more use of the public balance sheet to tide them over until they regain the ability to assess credit risk, starting with their own?) and what we should be investing in (honoring our long-term covenants with the American citizen and worker…renegotiating the arrangement if we simply must and making it worth the citizens’ while… or sending more tribute the corporate and individually wealthy powers’ way?) Do we worry about the environment, saving it for future generations, or just chew through it like motorboat blades through the water hyacinths and the manatees?
Sometimes, people look to the past for information on what to think of these latter-day fiscal tribulations. A common exhortation, strongly felt by many, is: how about that jobs program? How about packing on not cutting back government employment, given that private-sector corporations openly post “unemployed need not apply” these days? If companies are doing that – and the practice is so pervasive a recruiter is calling me and saying “We only place winners – people who have the proven ability to keep their jobs in this tough environment.”… well that’s just not raising my confidence that the level of public policy technology (read;: that we need to make room for private direct investment and jobs growth) is anything but up to specs.
Which brings us to the great meta question of the overall public policy debate: WHY NOT a jobs bill? This is past the hyper-partisan obstructionism of our right-wing brethren. And why are taxcutstaxcutsdidImentiontaxcuts not working? Why is everything we (left and right alike) thought we knew about public policy and economics wrong?
Because that is actually the answer under all the other answers, including Speaker Boehner’s incessant mantra of “I say no.. no.. no….”.
I think it may have to do with the cyclical pace of innovation – the introduction and testing of new idea, the developing of practical applications and proliferation of their uses in many markets, improvements in production processes and supply inputs, the activity generated by first their replacement of older products and practices and – eventually their own obsolescence and extinction.
Time for a really big-picture view: Over the past 7,000 years, there have been five eras of unusually high rates of innovation in human history [about 3000 BC, 500 BC, 600 AD, 1000 AD and the current one that began around 1500 AD –the fifth and by far the fastest-paced and farthest-reaching. This ,the Fifth Age of Innovation, our own, holds the potential to exhaust this world’s resources and doom all its life – or save all of that life, and find the passage to move beyond thinking of life on Earth to thinking of life in the universe.
Also – the pace of our current era is starting to slow down. Oh, it might pick up again in later centuries, assuming we survive, but the thing is we live in a strange age, where we have an immense backlog of undeveloped and underdeveloped innovative ideas. We could be spending the next three thousand years fleshing out all the details of concepts we are barely touching on, starting with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, alternative energy, trauma care, three-dimensional printing, and of course one of my faves, space travel. And these are among the most mundane notions. We have no idea what plasma is, never mind dark matter, never mind dark energy. We have yet to develop a mechanism for why objects going at high-relativity speeds gain mass… though if they actual nail down the Higgs boson they might be able to back into a gravitational gauge field. .and THAT is darn interesting and a possible key to, amongst other things mass AND time-flow control. Woo. And that’s just the beginning.
But… let’s get back public policy and economics and the connection with the pace of innovation.
New and nifty ideas are great but… what ever happens to them? Do they get developed? Are they any good? There really have been only two eras of unusually high development – empirical testing of ideas – one around the 1st Century AD (and it was in China NOT in Rome, thank you) and the other begun in the 1400s and very much focused on the onset of the European Age of Exploration and the origins of the global trade network that pretty much is the sine qua non of Western Civilization.. .if you ask the merchants. No one’s talked them out of it yet. No one’s replaced them just yet. In point of fact they pretty much still rule your world.
Yet that might change someday.
Now this is all great from a century-by-century perspective but no one is digging in that deep, are they?
So let’s try decade by decade since, oh the 1900s. Which decades are like ours? First of, we need a description, in technological activity terms of the 2010s (which are just starting), but we can’t really say anything prior to late 2007 is applicable to now. So, what does that give us?
It gives us an era with the sharpest drop in emerging new ideas since the 1910s. It’s the slowet for testing and development of new ideas for the sample period (though the 1910s are close). Again with take-off of new industries and transition of new tech to mature industries – worst, with the 1910s as the silver medalist decade.
We almost halfway through the list of 10 steps – and note the 1930s aren’t even on radar yet.
Now we reach saturation of markets, the point where there just aren’t new markets to open up. Highest rate of activity, the 2010s – second this time is the 1980s (if it wasn’t communist is was capitalist.. and then the Berlin Wall fell and now that ride is over it would seem.)
There’s a fall off of production limit events – this is the point where there’s just no new improved way to make those widgets .. or drill for the oil. The 2000s were the steepest fall-off. We’re tied in the 2010s with the 1960s.
We’re actually kind of blah on supply limit innovations but it’s a marked difference from the 2000s. Expect to hear lots of supply bottleneck news.. and then breakthroughs like, say, finding lithium in the ocean (which puzzles me because I was under the impression alkali earths reacted badly when put in contact with water. Anyone want to field that one?)
Replacement activity –swapping out old tech for new kit like, say, going nuts on hybrid engine automobiles – is chugging along at roughly the same pace it has been since the 1990s, much of it internet/ telecommunications driven.
Last but not least – the change-ups in marginalization of technologies and their final obsolence is very much akin to the 1910s.
In other words, we’re not re-living the 1930s. OR the 1920s. And we are not reliving the 1910s either.
But oddly enough, no one is looking very closely at the decade that hosted the beginning of the end of most of Europe’s empires and the open emergence of militarism and the proto-reactionary movements that midwived fascism.
You’d think, given the recent horrid news out of Europe, people might be wondering not about debt ceilings so much as why there is an emergent crisis of confidence in democratic institutions at the same time the current world order is facing its biggest geopolitical, never mind geo-economic, upheaval in over a century.
And with that, I gotta get this to press. I will post more, lots more, on this thinking and the data work I’ve been doing since October to get this up and running. It think it’s a promising line of study. Any and all are welcome to chip in, even with pie.
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Brillig's ObDisclaimer: I try reeeeallllyy hard to publish everything without regard to content. I really do, even when I disagree personally with any given nomination. "TopCommentness" lies in the eye of the nominator, and you the reader. I do not publish self-nominations (ie your own comments).
From smileycreek:
This video posted by paradise50 in mid day open thread rips the mask off Boehner and Cantor's true agenda.
In Cali Scribe's diary A Pioneer Has Passed, revsue described how quickly attitudes towards female clergy changed 20 years ago in her church...and all it took was one brief experience with female clergy.
From Ed Tracey:
In the midst of her cancer diary
on Day #32: the author alliedoc then writes about watching CNN's coverage of
the first day of marriage equality in New York State .... to which fromer
chimes in, telling how a hetero father of two just can't understand
the fuss, saying (amongst other things):
Love is love. Getting in the way of love is stupid and evil. There's too
much pain in the world to spend energy crapping on someone else's joy.
From Yours Truly, brillig:
Today's diary Exercise by Armando should be required by everyone taking part in our current polarized circular firing squad. This comment by oneshot gets my nomination for the last paragraph: "For the record, anyone who either defends everything our president does, or hates everything this president does is not looking at things in an honest way, and is not evaluating his actions objectively."