Americans have had it so good, for so long, that they seem to have forgotten what government’s heavy hand does to living standards and economic growth. But the same technological innovation that is causing all this dislocation and anxiety has also created an information network that is as near to real-time as the world has ever experienced.
For example, President Bush put steel tariffs in place in March 2002. Less than two years later, in December 2003, he rescinded them. This is something most politicians don’t do. But because the tariffs caused such a sharp rise in the price of steel, small and mid-size businesses complained loudly. The unintended consequences became visible to most Americans very quickly.
Decades ago the feedback mechanism was slow. The unintended consequences of the New Deal took too long to show up in the economy. As a result, by the time the pain was publicized, the connection to misguided government policy could not be made. Today, in the midst of Internet Time, this is no longer a problem. So, despite protestations from staff at the White House, most people understand that food riots in foreign lands and higher prices at U.S. grocery stores are linked to ethanol subsidies in the U.S., which have sent shock waves through the global system.
This is the good news. Policy mistakes will be ferreted out very quickly. As a result, any politician who attempts to change things will be blamed for the unintended consequences right away.
Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama view the world from a legislative perspective. Like the populists before them, they seem to believe that government can fix problems in the economy. They seem to believe that what the world needs is a change in the way government attacks problems and fixes the anxiety of voters. This command-and-control approach, however, forces a misallocation of resources. And in Internet Time this will become visible in almost real-time, creating real political pain for the new president.
In contrast to what some people seem to believe, having the government take over the health-care system is not change. It’s just a culmination of previous moves by government. And the areas with the worst problems today are areas that have the most government interference education, health care and energy.
The best course of action is to allow a free-market economy to reallocate resources to the place of highest returns. In the midst of all the natural change, the last thing the U.S. economy needs is more government involvement, whether it’s called change or not.
Internet
Duz Web Mak Us Dumr?
Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic, suggests that the Internet is changing the way people think, and specifically interfering with the ability to concentrate:
I can feel it too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going–so far as I can tell–but it’s changing…I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.
Of course, the idea that emerging communications media change the way people think and perceive the world is not a new one. As Carr notes, Socrates expressed concern about the development of writing, fearing that people would “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful,” and, worse, that they would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Concerns were also raised when the printing press was introduced.
In the early 19th century, a journalist writing about the introduction of the telegraph marveled:
This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.
Heinrich Heine, living in Paris in 1843, made a similar observation about the coming of the railroads:
I feel the mountains and forests of all countries advancing towards Paris. Already, I smell the scent of German lime-trees; the North-Sea breaks on my doorstep.
Closer to our own time, we’ve seen the introduction of the photography, radio, the phonograph, and television. I’m currently reading Eric Weitz’s Weimar Germany, which has some intereresting comments about the impact of the first three of these innovations. Arnold Schoenberg, for one, was a harsh critic of radio, saying that it “accustoms the ear to an unspeakably coarse tone, and to a body of sound constituted in a soupy, blurred way, which precludes all finer differentiation.” He worried that radio gave music a “continuous tinkle” that would eventually result in a state wherein “all music has been consumed, worn out.”
Weitz quotes Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s:
There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.
Roth didn’t much like photography, either:
People who had completely ordinary eyes, all of a sudden obtain a look. The indifferent become thoughtful, the harmless full of humor, the simpleminded become goal oriented, the common strollers look like pilots, secretaries like demons, directors like Caesars.
The Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan wrote famously about the impact of television, arguing that the nature of the medium had an impact entirely separate from any content transmitted–that, for example, Jack Kennedy had won the election against Richard Nixon because TV is a “cool” medium, well-suited to Kennedy’s personality and hostile to that of Nixon. (McLuhan had earlier written about the impact of printing on perceptions and thought processes.)
So, what do you think? Has the Internet had an effect on the way you think–and particularly, on your reading and TV/film watching?
Random Thought
Why is it that software developers, in the GUIs of common software, particularly blogging tools, put rarely used and dangerous functions (“Delete this [post/database/blog]”) immediately next to frequently used functions (“Save this [post/database/whatever]”)? This is stupid, yet one sees it not infrequently, and not only in version 1.0.
Not-so early versions of Movable Type actually had a “delete this blog” button. What was the purpose of such a function? Was it to let you destroy the evidence if the blog police were at your door? I don’t get it. It’s easy enough to delete your blog inadvertently using an FTP program; the developers shouldn’t do anything to make inadvertent deletion even easier. I always edited the MT scripts to remove that stupid button and the function it triggered.
WordPress, supposedly the latest and greatest, has a “Delete post” link next to the “Save” and “Publish” buttons. Why couldn’t they put the delete button somewhere else — say, at the bottom of the page? For every post that I’ve deleted intentionally I have come close to deleting several more posts accidentally, merely because the delete link is in a dumb place. For all of its brilliance, WordPress has the feel of a vanity project managed by a few clever developers who ignore the marketing guy who suggests that maybe it’s not such a great idea to put the delete button next to the save button.
But of course there is no marketing guy, because WordPress is an open-source project managed by a few clever developers. Maybe that’s the problem. If WP were being sold for real money, the developers might have no choice but to put more care into GUI design. And they might be able to afford to hire specialists to do it. But since it’s open-source, and users are members of a “community” rather than paying customers, what’s the incentive to spiff up the GUI? OTOH, given the competition from other (free) blogging packages, it might not be possible to sell WP.
It’s interesting that some basic GUI issues are not given much weight in the race to add software features. I don’t know if there’s a remedy for this situation.
Kindle Review
If you are interested, I have put up a short review of the Amazon Kindle at LITGM. Â Here is the link.