Barack Obama:
“It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth — that used to be us.” (Nov 3, 2010)
“America became an economic superpower because we knew how to build things. We built the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Hoover Dam, and the Interstate Highway System. And now, we’re settling for China having the best high-speed rail, and Singapore having better airports? When did that happen? “(Oct 25 2011)
George Savage juxtaposes the latter Obama statement with his decision, only two weeks later, to delay approval for the construction of a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, which was estimated to provide about 20,000 jobs, as well as having an obvious beneficial impact on America’s energy security. Indeed, it should be obvious at this point that the main inhibitors to the building of any large project whatsoever are regulatory overreach and complexity and the exploitation of the legal and regulatory environment by precisely the kind of activists that Obama the community organizer has spent much of his life encouraging. Obama’s complaints about us not building things resemble the plea of the defendant who killed both of his parents and then asked for mercy because he was an orphan. (More thoughts on large projects then versus now at my post like swimming in glue.)
But in addition to the above point, the kinds of projects about which Obama waxes enthusiastic (to the degree that any enthusiasm is contained in his rather flat emotional range) reveal much about the “progressive” economic worldview.
The president wants to talk about trains? Okay, let’s talk about trains. beginning with the fact that US freight railroads carried 1.7 trillion ton-miles in 2008. This is more than twice the ton-mileage hauled in 1980, the year that the Staggers Act was passed and the remarkable renaissance of the US railroad industry began. Efficient freight rail offers a huge economic advantage to a country, and knowledgeable people tend to agree that the US industry is the most efficient in the world. But of course freight isn’t as glamorous as high-speed passenger trains, and “progressives” generally seem much less-interested in the workaday world of gondola cars and containers than in emulating the passenger facilities offered by the European countries with which they are so enthralled. Indeed, despite his frequent use of the word “infrastructure,” I have to question whether Obama has the slightest knowledge of or even curiosity about the way goods are transported in this country and elsewhere in the world. See Coyote Blog’s related post about shifting capital from the productive to the sexy.
The president wants to talk about computers? Okay, let’s talk about computers. It is possible that the Tianhe-1A supercomputer located in Tianjin is indeed the fastest computer in the world—but its ability to use this potential performance is dependent on dividing the work for a problem in a way that keeps most of its 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and its 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs usefully busy. This is a software problem, not a hardware one. (And as far as hardware goes, Nvidia and Intel are of course both US companies.) Without attempting to take anything away from the Chinese achievement in building the Tianhe-1A, I’d suggest that providing the GPU/CPU components on which it is based, and doing the kind of system design work that IBM did for its much-hyped Watson system, represent technological contributions at least as significant as the Tianhe machine. Moreover, US researchers with heavy computational needs will benefit immensely from the kind of on-demand processing (“cloud”) infrastructures being put in place by Amazon and others.
One example of an important problem which is computationally-intensive is the modeling of protein folding, which is important in biomedical research. And one way to solve it is by assigning the task to very large supercomputers. But another way, described in this article, is to bring in the resources of thousands of individual home computers and gaming machines and the human skills of their volunteer owners. The latter approach recently resulted in the solution in three weeks of a folding problem that had remained unsolved for more than a decade.
The obsession with giantism, with prestige projects, and with top-down direction was of course a defining characteristic of the old Soviet Union, and had much to do with its economic failure. It is an approach which is destructive not only of a society’s productivity but also and more importantly of its spirit.
Obama would be cool with those giant statues of Stalin and Saddam Hussein. That’s how he thinks, I suspect. Lysenko would have him enthralled.
Collectivism requires the destruction of the concept of cause and effect, in order for its various claims on “social resources” or “public wealth” to pass without complicating questions about where these resources came from, and whose property the wealth in question actually is.
Like the recent manifestation of the occupiers, collectivist cant is shapeless and disconnected, chanting fine sounding phrases without concern for the probable effects such theories will have in the real world.
In Obama’s universe, the collectivist paradise to which he wishes to lead us, x does not lead to y which leads to z.
Preventing the construction of a pipeline which would greatly ease the nation’s energy problems, and bring about a great many jobs along the way, floats independently in the free-form plasma of his mind, outweighed by the more important matter of his maintaining the support he needs politically from the anti-oil forces in the collective coalition.
But building a showpiece rail line is a big deal to another faction in the coalition, so committing enormous resources to that project is imperative, and it is desperately needed immediately, not by any potential riders, but by the interested elements in the collective coalition, who will get a piece of the action of any such big state project.
Until you realize that the only criteria that matter are those which bring about an increase in the collectivist’s power to control people and their wealth to use for his own purposes, many of these conflicting ideas seem contradictory. They are not.
You’re looking at the issue from the point of view of actually getting productive projects completed as efficiently as possible.
The collectivist sees only an increase in power, or not. Nothing else matters.
VR….indeed, the collectivist leader is only concerned about his own power. But in some cases even the most power-hungry collectivist leader must worry about actual economic productivity…Stalin, for example, needed economic growth first to demonstrate the superiority of his system, and hence expand his own power, and later to avoid the German victory which would have quickly led to his total loss of power and life.
OTOH, many individuals who tend to go along with collectivism, and who have never really studied economics or history or participated in running a business, really do believe that Obama-style projects will benefit the economy.
David, severely off topic – but I think you’ll find this amusing; I knew when I saw it that I needed to pass this along. “Educator”, indeed!
What is the differance between Soviet dwarfs and American dwarfs?
Soviet dwarfs are bigger.
Please check the article inked at Instapundit regarding China called “Every province is Greece”. Sometimes validation comes from unexpected quarters.