Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Megan McArdle asks, if politically-managed health care is so great, why isn’t military health care a shining example to be emulated? [h/t Instapundit]
It’s an important question to ask and answer because the military health-care system is a completely socialized system. If we can politically manage health care in the real world then the military system should be a shining example of medical care in America. Yet care for both for service personnel and their dependents sucks.
Reason puts the business management skills of politicians into perspective:
Keep in mind that the “annihilating cuts” proposed thus far include trimming 5,000 employees out of a 235,000-strong state workforce (after a historic run-up in the state’s employee-per-resident ratio). So: Only after hiking spending by 40 percent in five years, raising taxes across the board, matching even Gray Davis’ deficits, and then getting spanked in a multi-tax suite of propositions, is California’s debased political class even beginning to contemplate a 2 percent reduction in its bloated, tax-sucking workforce. Maybe voter petulance isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Even successful and sound businesses all across the country this year are going to lose more than 2% of their workforce by attrition following hiring freezes. Californian’s dysfunctional political system can’t even trim that many jobs in the face of near total financial collapse.
They’re boned and the rest of us are going to pay for it.
(I originally posted this in 2006. With the current push toward top-down micromanagement of virtually all aspects of the economy, it seems worth posting again. I should also note that a trillion is probably way too small a number to use for an estimate of the economic value of this technology)
The invention of the transistor was an event of tremendous economic importance. Although there was already a substantial electronics industry, based on the vacuum tube, the transistor gave the field a powerful shot of adrenaline and brought about the creation of vast amounts of new wealth.
As almost everyone knows, the transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, all researchers at Bell Laboratories, in 1946. But a recent article in Spectrum suggests that the true history of the transistor is more complex…and interesting not only from the standpoint of the history of technology, but also from the standpoint of economic policy.
The story begins in Germany, during World War II. Owing to short-sighted decisions by the Nazi leadership, Germany’s position in radar technology had fallen behind the capabilities of Britain and of the United States. (Reacting the the prospect of airborne radar, Herman Goering had said “My pilots do not need a cinema on board!”)
But by 1943, even the dullest Nazi could see the advantages that the Allies were obtaining from radar. In February of that year, Goering ordered an intensification of radar research efforts. One of the scientists assigned to radar research was Herbert Matare, who had been an electronics experimenter as a teenager and had gone on the earn a doctorate.
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times is much impressed by the books Obama has read, or says he has read. I am almost in despair when I read the same list. Obama will be the commander in chief — but he appears to have read almost nothing on military history or strategy. And he does not seem to see that as a defect in his preparation for the presidency. There no books on science, technology, or economics in the list.
(Of the many things I do not like about Obama, this ignorance of his role as Commander in Chief scares me the most. I share Miller’s despair, but without the qualification of “almost”. Like Miller, I fondly hope he surprises me. At least, for now, he has some good advisors on the subject.)
UPDATE: Obama’s reading list, with links. Dude. Wow. It is thin. (Via Instapundit)
UPDATE II: Henry Kissinger somewhere said that once you get into high office you consume intellectual capital. You cannot add to it. You don’t have time. You’d better have a good stock of intellectual firewood, because you are going to burn it all. Obama’s got a pretty much empty woodshed. God help us, he better have good advisors and a good gut, and the luck of the Irish (I’ll lend him mine) and a rabbit’s foot. I don’t think you can just be “smart” in general, you have to actually know things. The very people who berated Bush for being an intellectual lightweight have bought this Obama guy like he is a bright, shiny, new Red Wagon. But there is no reason to think that Bush was less knowledgeable than this guy, other than the smoothness of Obama’s delivery. And Bush was a bitter disappointment to many of his supporters (my hand is raised) and a figure of hatred and ridicule to lots of other people. Stay tuned. We just handed the car keys to some guy from out of town with a nice smile and a glossy shoe shine. Hope it all works out … .
A discussion about the financial crisis, Wall Street, management and accountability at Neptunus Lex. The initial post is merely the starting point for some insightful comments by readers. Worth reading in full.
There seems to be a trend toward diminished accountability for top members of our political and business elites. People who should resign don’t. Leaders who should fire those people don’t. The military still seems pretty good (perhaps it’s no accident that the discussion I linked is on a blog written and frequented by military people). Accountability standards in small business and many professions, where failure tends to be immediate and personal, still seem OK. But things appear to be on the decline in big institutions and government. I don’t know if that’s because government has grown so big and intrusive that it drags down standards everywhere, or because our society has deteriorated, or both. It’s a bad trend either way.