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.
This is a call for questions for the civic welcome wagon project.
There’s going to be an essay for each state. There’s going to be an essay for every metro area in the US
There’s going to be a prompt document of stuff that should be in each essay on both the state and metro area. I’m thinking of it as a sort of questionnaire. So what should be in these questionnaire documents?
On GitHub, there is now a public repository for essays to create a civic welcome wagon. A public repository in GitHub means anyone can contribute. If you don’t like what I wrote, fork it, write something better, and compete.
My previous post about using Git in this fashion can be found here.
In an interview, Elon Musk said he wished we could “just have a normal person as President.” He also went on to say:
Since the president is effectively the executive officer of the country, it actually matters if they are a good executive officer. It’s not simply a matter of do they share your beliefs. But are they good at getting things done? There are a lot of decisions that need to be made every day. Many of them are unrelated to moral beliefs.”
I certainly agree with Elon about the importance of executive skill in a President–it is an ability that is clearly and sadly missing in Biden, as well as in certain past Presidents. After all, the President’s primary and constitutionally-defined job is execution, not legislation. Yet operations is something that Biden is clearly not interested in, nor, I believe, was Obama.
Where I disagree with the above Musk passage is that phrase executive officer of the country. No. The President is executive officer of the government, not of the country. The government is not the society. It is an agent of the society.
If statism in this country existed to the level that a US President could truly be said to be the executive officer of the country, then Musk would not have been able to accomplish the things he has accomplished without overwhelming levels of government approval, far about and beyond those approvals he has in fact had to get. Rinse and repeat for all innovations, whether product or business process.
Indeed, given the role of Congress and that of the judiciary, even a President’s job as executive officer of the country is more analogous to a Chief Operating Officer in the private sector than that of a private-sector CEO.
…in China this time.
Last year, Chinese unemployment for those between the ages of 16 and 24 reached 20%—a record high and more than double what it was in 2018. The job shortage is particularly acute for graduates with advanced degrees, people who had expected the most from the job market because their families had sunk up to a third of their income into their education. During last autumn’s hiring season, around 45% of recent college graduates in China received no job offers, according to one published survey.
The manufacturing sector in China is experiencing a severe labor shortage: Four out of five Chinese manufacturers report that their workforces are falling 10% to 30% short of their needs, and the education ministry forecasts a shortage of 30 million manufacturing workers by 2025.
and
Diplomas, it turns out, have not necessarily translated into the skills sought by the high-tech sector or the smart-manufacturing companies that China aims to promote. The Chinese education system was designed during a period when most students would go on to work for state-owned enterprises. Today, their skills at standardized test-taking and their homogenous-looking CVs rarely meet the market economy’s demand for real-world experience, mental flexibility and individual passion.
also
The consequences of reduced expectations among unemployed youth are profound. Members of the young generation increasingly are putting off getting married and starting a family, breaking the traditions of a Confucian society. In 2021, there were only 7.6 million new marriages registered, a 38% drop from 2015. Meanwhile the birthrate has fallen to the lowest the country has ever seen.
If you wanted a distribution channel for text files that is practically uncensorable and highly resistant to being taken over by hostile gatekeepers, you could do worse than the open-source software program git and the sharing platform GitLab. Git lets you manage arbitrary text files and share them with anyone that downloads the software. GitLab and its better-known competitor GitHub let you easily share projects.
If outside pressure comes along demanding GitHub or GitLab get rid of your project, losing access to either or both of the hosting platforms isn’t the end of the story. You can install a version of GitLab on your own server and keep working with the nice abstractions that the sharing platform software provides on top of git or even just share the repository on the Internet as a directory and just use git. Even a search and seizure of all your computers is just a bump in the road because anyone who has cloned your repository has all the files and can publish them.
The hostile gatekeeper problem is handled by the project license, which should allow others to fork (copy and make a legal clone of) a project and the nature of git. Everyone who grabs the project is cloning it onto their local hard drive. It’s trivial to get around the gatekeeper so why bother being a jerk about other people participating? Someone will clone the project, behave better, and replace the misbehaving gatekeeper.
Since everyone gets a copy of shared content in their own fork and everyone can move the project in the direction that they’d like, the risk of doing useless work goes down. You pick what you’d like to add and your own version maintains that addition. Nobody can stop you. Whatever you contribute can’t get deleted later on. You never let it go.