James L Adams—People and Products

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering Math) In Education

In the Opinion section of the Dec. 8 New York Times there are two pleas for more emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) in education.  The first one, by their editorial board, is here.  The second, a column by Thomas Friedman is here.  You have probably run across similar pleas recently, because they are very much in the media.  Such pleas have occurred before—for instance after the successful Soviet launch of Sputnik—and probably are now occurring because of a combination of the importance of these topics in the economy and the availability of good jobs in such areas.

Most suggestions on how to remedy this situation focus on teachers and schools.  It isn’t that easy.  Granted that curricula and material should be updated and teachers be given more opportunity to stay current in these fields, but teachers are also carrying a huge load of socializing students, dealing with parents, and carrying out various administrative tasks—all for relatively low pay and lack of recognition.

Parents who do not work in these areas must try to contribute more by staying at least current enough to discuss them with their kids and help them with their homework.  These topics are relatively difficult to master, and often a good bit of encouragement is needed.  After the launch of Sputnik, an updated approach to handling math in the schools (New Math) was tried, but failed, and I was convinced at the time that part of the reason was that parents were not comfortable with the concepts.

People working in these fields, and the companies and laboratories they work for must become more involved in education.  This is difficult, because not everyone is a good teacher, and people who are good in their fields are busy at their jobs.  But if the U.S. is going to have more STEM people, industry and laboratories will have to play a part for motivational reasons as well educational.  Classes in school do not, and probably never will, give a good insight into the life of people in these activities. 

Unfortunately, STEM areas have changed very rapidly in recent history, due to things like digital electronics and computers, discoveries in areas such as genetics, space science and nanotechnology, and the rise of competence in them in many countries (China, Japan, South Korea, India, Etc.)  I was an undergraduate at Caltech, earned a Ph.D. from Stanford, have been involved in engineering in both industry and academia my entire career, and I can barely keep up.  As science and technology change, they become more complex, more esoteric, and less consistent with our intuition. I studied the theory of relativity as an undergraduate, but wasn’t sure I believed it.  A few years later we were putting corrections into orbits for planetary spacecraft to account for it.  Now we have string theory. As another example, think how much the discovery of the structure of DNA/RNA and the development of medical scanning have affected us in relatively few years.

As another problem, and one which has been around for all of my life, we need to do something about the negative attitudes that many people have about these areas. When I entered Caltech we were given a series of lectures about how to minimize our “Geek” reputation, which came with being a student at an engineering/science school.  This included advice such as “never talk math or science at a party”, and “drink and play a lot of sports”.  I later spent some time in art school at U.C.L.A. and didn’t seem to need suggestions on how to be cool.  Despite all of the money Bill Gates has made, the breakthroughs Microsoft has brought us, and the incredible good he is doing with his foundation, many people still are sure he is a nerd.

And we have to drop the “two culture” habit —dividing the population into what Stanford students used to call the “techies” and the “fuzzies”.  I’ve spent many years attacking it, and it is very deep in the U.S.  I suspect it is a legacy from the British.  It was the topic of C.P. Snow’s now famous 1959 Rede lecture, which is here.  After all, accredited engineering programs in U.S. universities require at least one full year of courses in the humanities and social sciences.  Why aren’t majors in these fields required to take at least one full year of engineering and natural sciences?  And why can’t I talk about math, science, and engineering at parties? 

 

The Internet, Critical Books, and People

In my last post I mentioned that there is a noticeable increase in criticism of the Internet, and mentioned a few books as examples.  Today, to my amazement, the entire Book Review section of the November 3 New York Times was devoted to books about this topic, only one of which I have read —more to order.  You can see the reviews here, as well as a short article that is worth reading entitled “Is Tech Lit An Oxymoron?”. The books reviewed are not all negative about the Internet in general and social networking in particular, but there is a good bit of that.  This is not surprising, since many, if not most writers appreciate the book rather than the tweet and generally view the internet responsible for such things as the near disappearance of small book stores, the dire economic straits of traditional publishers, and the encouragement of brevity in writing at perhaps the cost in style, argument, and general story telling. 

 One of the books reviewed, by Alice Marwick, apparently singles out a marketing person named Gary Vaynerchuck for particular criticism.  Probably coincidentally, he is featured as the cover article entitled “Riding the Hashtag” in the business section of the same issue of the paper.  It is here.  He is apparently eagerly sought as an expert at Internet marketing and although he is clearly becoming famous and making money, his chosen work is about as far as how I want to spend my time as I can imagine.

 I have been using computers for a long time, beginning with using a large IBM mainframe to solve structural and thermal problems in aerospace in the 1950’s, although I must admit I was restricted to giving the problems to programmers, and certainly was not allowed to touch the machine.  And I am reasonably competent with contemporary hardware and soft ware .  But I retired from active duty on the Stanford faculty before smart phones and social networking became the rage.  I obviously have a cell phone, which seems to be a social requirement, but I still do not have a smart phone, because they seem to convert the owner into a constant sender and checker of e-mail and text messages, surfer of the internet, user of apps, etc.   I prefer to constrain such activities to a specific time each day, in order to not be interrupted doing other things that are very important to me. Unfortunately I am about to test my self discipline by getting a smart phone, in order to escape going mad using the brand new three-layer security system on Stanford’s network— a task which is simplified through use of a smart phone app.  But that is another story.

 As I also mentioned in my last post, two or three years ago I began social networking—this blog plus Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin— but have not gotten strongly involved because of a great deal of ambivalence on my part.  So far I have been more a watcher than a participant.  I have ”friended” some of my actual friends, am followed by people on Twitter, although I have not tried to attract followers, and I have some contacts and have joined some groups on LinkedIn.   I can see its benefits, but I neither comfortable with nor willing to spend the time trying to attract and communicate with a large following, and many people I would like to communicate with more are not actively involved in social networking.  In addition although I understand the importance of marketing in a capitalistic system, I think people who are constantly marketing themselves or their goods are a pain (I get enough of them on my phone and in print and TV ads) and they are plentiful in social networking.  Also, I gain a lot more from personal interaction with fewer people who are working on the same kind of problems I am interested in, than I do from a large crowd of people I have never met.  And since I feel guilty not spending more time with the friends I have, I am not looking for new ones.   I also prefer communication formats that allow more time than is popular with Internet communications.  On the positive side, I must admit I am fascinated by the affect of the Internet and social networking on people, and I can probably see it more clearly as a participant. Maybe I fall in with the book people.

 That is why I am glad to see a wider variety of thinking about social networking becoming available in the form of books and articles.  I need to decide whether to devote more time and energy to social networking or to quit.  It has its good side, and will improve, but I have other activities on my agenda.  And the type of deeply thought-out and hopefully substantiated opinions found in books helps me decide such things. As I read the books, I will post more details and my own reactions to them.

 

 

Entrepreneurship—An Answer to Everything?

The media is feeding more and more on entrepreneurship, an activity of which we in the U.S. are proud, and to which we have been recently looking more and more in order to solve our economic /employment problems.

 The  Schumpeter article in the October 12-18 2013 issue of The Economist entitled Not Open for Business (it is here) speaks of widely known weaknesses in the U.S. (as seen by entrepreneurs) that slow us down: lack of adequately trained human capital; immigration laws that make it difficult or impossible for many people from other countries who have played a major role in entrepreneurship in the past to live here; government regulations and taxes; and difficulty of raising money, in light of the perceived increasingly risk-adverse nature of venture capitalists.  As the article points out, start-ups created only 2.7 million new jobs in the 2012 financial year, as opposed to 4.7 million in 1999.

 But an article in the October 14, 2013 New Yorker, entitled San Francisco Transforms the Country, Again (here), paints a different picture, and one to which I resonate because I work in the university.  The article speaks of younger people (20’s, 30’s) who are well on their way of building an entrepreneurial culture based on small amounts of funding (thousands or tens of thousands instead of millions) from sources varying from crowd sourcing, to friends who are doing small scale angel investing based on successes they have had, to enterprises such as Y Combinator (here). 

 But the entrepreneurs discussed in this article are looking for life-style and individual freedom, rather than building great companies or manufacturing outstanding products.  Nor are they thinking of fast growth and large profits. They are taking advantage of the low cost of developing software and the increasing business services available on the internet to help form and run a company and market a product. But how important of a product?  An example of a  particular person who is admired in the article for his rewarding life style is a member of Sidecar, a group who sell people rides around the city in their private cars.  He lives in Tiberon (north of San Francisco), and drives to Palo Alto, (south of San Francisco) each day to play golf.  As he passes through San Francisco he checks into Sidecar, picks up enough rides to pay for his trip and golf, and heads to the links.  The person who admired the golfer during the interviews envisions the future as “everybody is a private contractor, snatching jobs out of the ether, working for one another as they please”.  Entrepreneurial perhaps, but hardly creating large numbers of jobs and big profits.

 People in their 20’s and 30’s (and teens) seem to be considering entrepreneurship because it is in and cool these days.  But they do not have families or large expenses yet.  When questioned about this, the San Francisco young entrepreneurs either have not thought about such things, or reply that they guess that they will eventually work for a large established company such as Google if they need to.

 And although entrepreneurs do not think they will fail, the majority of them do.  The San Francisco group seems to be willing to support those that do from their community, but even those start-ups that succeed, grow rapidly, and produce larger profits do not always offer the founder a wonderful life.  A good read on that topic is entitled All's Fair in Love and Twitter in the New York Times Magazine of October 13, 2013, and is here.

 

 

Product Quality, Luxury Watches, and Silliness

 My wife and I have a long tradition of Spending part of Sunday morning in bed reading the New York Times and eating breakfast munchies.  I like the  Times in general, but find its Fashion magazine increasingly inconsistent with the rest of the newspaper.  I can guess why it is included, since it is heavily given over to obviously highly paid advertisements often for luxury goods.  This is the successful format for many magazines such as Architectural Digest—read about how the Celebs live and how to spend vast amounts of money on things that will make others realize how rich you are.

 They begin this magazine with a section they call Lookout, which comments on various expensive things to do.  Today (October 6, 2013) my wife pointed out a small section entitled “Market Report” that talked about travel watches. We both have travelled a lot, and quickly learned to take minimum luggage, and nothing that you would mind losing or having lifted in the subway.  The section begins with the statement “Serious travelers deserve a world-class watch that can seamlessly keep track of up to 24 time zones.”

 First of all, one only needs a watch that can keep track of 24 time zones if one is unable to add and subtract. Secondly, the need for a watch is disappearing, because ones friendly cell/smart phone always has the time prominently featured.  If one chooses not carry such a thing (I am often guilty),  in urban areas a clock is usually visible without spending a lot of effort finding one, and in the country people will guess the time for you. But these days, due to such things as quartz crystals and small efficient batteries, if one wants a travel watch it is possible to find a nice low-cost one that if lost, can be replaced with little pain.  My wife is in love with the Timex Indiglo (see photo), which keeps very good time, is very easy to read (even including a light on the dial), and has the contemporary “large” look.  It is not the cheapest watch available, but can be had for about $30.00.

 So what does the Market Report suggest?  Such things as the Girard-Perregaux Shopping World Timer watch at $26,100, the Dior Timepieces Christal 8 watch at $63,000, and the Cartier Tortue Multiple Time Zones XXL watch, price on request.  Or you can purchase a Rolex for between $10 ,000 and $70,000 and try to look like Roger Federer or a successful financier (incidentally, excellent Rolex copies are available for about $150.)

 Like most people, when I travel, I like to experience the local scene, which means I occasionally find myself wandering through rather questionable neighborhoods and taking local subways and buses.  The median income in the world is approximately $2000 per year, which is about $5.50 per day.  That means that half the world is living on that or less.  If I were living on five dollars a day, a $50,000 watch is equivalent to 10,000 days, or 27 years of income.  If I was constrained to such an income and saw a tourist walking down the street with what I recognized as a Dior Timepieces Christal 8 watch, would I be tempted to appropriate it?   Well…………..

 I was not born to money, and I am not impressed by people who make a show of their wealth, so I am biased about luxury goods. But I am sure that if I had $100,000 (or $100,000,000,000) to throw around, I would not buy a new $50.000 watch, especially to take travelling. I would much rather support a nice villager in India who was unable to work for 27 years (or perhaps more). 

Insights into the Middle East, and Changes in the Technology of War

Once again, due to attention being paid to Syria, the Middle East is  all over the U.S. media and should be in everyone’s mind.  A valuable perspective is in a very well researched and book by Scott Anderson, entitled Lawrence In Arabia: War Deceit, Imperial Volley and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Doubleday, New York, 2013—more details by clicking the icon at the right).

 The book covers World War I in the middle east, with a focus on four characters:  William Yale, raised as an aristocrat, an employee of Standard Oil Company, and the only American field intelligence office in the Middle east during World War, who was to strongly influence American opinion about the Middle East after the war, Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish scientist who was a fervent champion for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine and established a spy-ring in Turkey to help fulfill his goal, Curt Prufer, a German scholar who sought to foment an Islamic Jihad against the western colonial powers, and of course T.E. Lawrence, who, although a loyal British subject, acted to help the Arabs remain independent of the colonial powers, believing that such an outcome would be preferable both to the area and to Britain. 

 Lawrence became famous by “going native” and leading successful guerrilla forays which accomplished things that the British army, weighed down by tradition and lack of knowledge of the area and its people, could not.  Interestingly enough, he was a fan of  “The Art of War”, by Sun Tsu.  The  photo at the left, taken from his Wikipedia page shows him in his British army garb.  The second shows him in his preferred fighting configuration. 

 As the book beautifully argues, the results of the Paris Peace Conference, — major control by the British and French in the area, decreased power for the Arabs, encouragement for Jewish  immigration into Palestine with no agreement about what that might mean, were the precursors of present problems.  As the author states in the epilogue to the book “Certainly blame for all this (the unrest in the Mid East) doesn’t rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted.  Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialization, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed feverishly nurtured— by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people’s anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is “the great Satan”, or the “illegitimate Zionist entity” or Western music playing on the streets.”

 Read the book.  It will help you understand where we are.

 But I also found the book interesting because it portrays the differences and similarities of politics and war in the almost 100 year period since World War I.  In a sense international politics have not changed a great deal, despite the existence of the United Nations, increased globalization, and improved communication. It is still about perceived power and pecking order, although nations seem to be becoming a bit more thoughtful before they move from arguing to fighting.

 But we are slowly learning that our beloved “Western” theories of war no longer seem to work very well.  We in the U.S. should have learned that in our own Civil War, fought with large numbers of equally armed people confronting each other at close range.  But we didn’t, with the result that over 600,000 of our own people died.   World War I is now famous for its slaughter in the trenches and a settlement that undoubtedly played a role in causing World  War II. We certainly should  have learned it during the 20^th century.  Estimates are that 160 million people were killed in war during that period.  And what was accomplished? 

 The U.S. has been involved in several wars (police actions) since World War II, and as time goes on has learned to place less and less faith on fixed battles. The present fascination with “smart” weapons, drones, and cyber- war seems  to show an aversion to wholesale killing of non-combatants and armies of millions fighting battles of attrition.   Or maybe it just shows our love affair with technology.

 But unless strong institutions develop that are respected by all countries (international laws that are agreed upon and enforced) wars /police actions will continue. And our history in establishing such institutions has not been too impressive.  So what form will these wars/police actions take?  There are many opinions, but I am not sure anyone knows.  The “rules” for what we call traditional warfare are well known.  We are now in new territory.  Keep your eye on the U.S. response to Syria’s use of poison gas.  It may be a portent of the future.

Internet Quality and Socialbots

I have been posting on Mondays and Thursdays for a while, but I am going to go to one post per week on Mondays.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First of all, I want to better focus my time on a couple of books I have underway.  The  books have to do with creativity and innovation when very large numbers of people are involved (governments, religions, nations, etc) and the advantages of working with the hands.  Secondly, I need to spend some time thinking about how I can best take advantage of the internet.  In order to do this, I need to learn more about the internet and the directions it is taking.

 Networking is obviously a work in progress, and faces continual problems. I am a user, but not aware enough of the pitfalls involved.  For instance I did not know about socialbots and the increasing resources going into their development. An article in the  New York Times of August 11, 2013, entitled "I Flirt and Tweet.  Follow Me at #Socialbot" by Ian Urbina is here, if you haven’t seen it.  It describes the increasing sophistication and use of software robots to communicate with people on social networking sites for various reasons, varying from marketing through politics to attempts to annoy them or push various causes.  The article claims that more than half of Web traffic is from non-humans.  But messages composed by non-humans are increasing in the social networking area.  Some researchers are estimating that only 35% of the followers of the average Twitter user are real people, and estimate that within two years, 10% of  all social networking traffic will be by bots masquerading as real people.

 Apparently many of these bots have been provided with real social networking accounts and the article contains entertaining and worrisome examples of their power.  One quotes  Christian Rudder, manager and cofounder of OkCupid, a dating site.  Apparently at one point, his group bought and redesigned a smaller dating site.  The result was a sizeable drop of non-human participants, but also a 15% drop in real human users,  because the robot participants provided a major amount of flirtatiousness and romance.  The article mentions that his programmers are trying to design bots which will flirt with socialbots joining his site and lure them away to another location.  

 And I need to think harder about who I really want to communicate with.

 But I will continue to babble on Mondays.

 

Product Quality, Marketing/Sales, and Life—A Minor Diatribe

When I arrived at Stanford, eagerly trying to understand such things as creativity/innovation and business, I cooperated in a number of workshops with a wonderful marketing professor in the business school named Bob Davis.  He was a very entertaining guy and devoted to defining marketing as not only different than sales, but a higher calling.  This is an activity that is common in graduate schools of business, even though it is a difficult line to draw.  This was before the days of digital communications, big data, esoteric analytical techniques, and involvement of top level statisticians and psychologists.  I was fascinated by the field of marketing, which seemed to be striving to better match products and people. 

 Now I am appreciably older, comfortably well off, seemingly equipped with everything I want, and amazingly annoyed by the inescapable presence of marketing/sales. Granted that I am not a typical consumer, but I am finding it insulting to have postcards trying to get me to subscribe to magazines drop out of magazines I already subscribe to, seemingly every store I enter trying to get me to join their “club”, endless attempts to get me to fill out surveys so that they have more information on me, and a world blanketed with advertisements everywhere I look and awash in commercials in all media I enter.

 I know what I want/need, and resent people trying to add to the list or alter my choices.  Do they think they know more about me than I do?  I find the self-marketing attitude of many internet addicts somewhat obnoxious (even though I admit I was talked into social networking by my publisher, who told me that otherwise no one would notice my Good Products Bad Products book).  I wonder at my wife’s daily ritual of rapidly going through our surface mail while standing over the re-cycling barrel, trying to avoid throwing something important away with the overwhelming majority of marketing-oriented junk.

 Is there no end to this?  I realize that we  humans seem to love “deals”, and that it is possible to show that this marketing “works”.   The recent trauma that J.C. Penney went through in seeking to move from hundreds of sales per year to constant lower prices (which I thought made great sense) resulted in a huge backlash and the resignation of its president after only eight months in office.  So I was wrong. Of course an organization called One Million Moms turned against the company for using Ellen De Generes  as a spokesperson.  Not being one of the Million Moms, I can’t claim any insight on that one.

 And of course, look at our ability to create “celebrities”, political campaigns, and national propaganda.

 But how much does this constantly increasingly sophisticated and wide-spread marketing/sales actually benefit us and the economy?  It definitely makes jobs, but is the noise it creates perhaps greater than the good it accomplishes? 

 I find myself avoiding products and being against people whose marketing interferes with the quality of my life, whether through producing billboards that mar beautiful country or attractive buildings, commercials that interrupt things I am interested in, messages repeated so constantly that I assume someone thinks I am so stupid I don’t understand them, junk mail, internet ads, phone calls that are unerringly synchronized with my meals, questionnaires, coupons, clubs, and other tools intended to influence me in ways the producers of goods and services think are positive.

 I want good stuff, and can’t clearly see the correlation between the quality of the marketing effort and the quality of the product or person being marketed.  I wish we would just produce outstanding choices and let me choose!   

Product Quality: UAVs (Drones) —The Biggest Potential Nuisance Ever?

An interesting list compiled this year by the American Institute of Aeronautics and and summarizing activity on the design and production of so-called unmanned aerial vehicles, contains 960 distinct aircraft being developed and produced by 270 companies in 57 countries.  The corresponding figures two years ago were 675 aircraft. 226 companies, and 44 nations. There is clearly fast growth here.  If you would like to scan the list, it is here.    .

 An article discussing the situation is in the July-august 2013 issue of Aerospace America, a publication of the AAIA, and the link is here.

 There is obvious attraction to these machines for military purposes, in that they are relatively cheap, versatile (observation to weapon platform), and do not risk human crew members.  They are also capable of maneuvers and missions that humans cannot, or would rather not do. Of course there is a great debate going on about their use, because they can, and have been used as assassination machines, and such things are controversial in military and government circles, especially if one is on the short list of potential victims.

 But many spokespeople for UAVs predict that they will soon be more heavily used for non-military government and commercial purposes — enforcing the law, dealing with fires and natural disasters, and enforcing environmental rules, as well as learning more about transportation and people, advertising products, aiding contractors and landscapers in their search for work, and other such seemingly innocuous tasks.  If they are right, I hope a lot of early thought goes into regulating the things.

 A short-range low cost hobby drone can now be built for on the order of 1000 dollars, and a reasonably reliable one perhaps adaptable to commercial use for 10,000 dollars.  Higher production and advanced technology will continue to reduce the cost of many components, although  if  UAV’s have commercial application, increased capability will offset this.  And with the technology presently available, they will be noisy.

 I see them from the bias of a person who grew up in an area with low population and generally hates the noise of such things as heavy traffic, construction noise, powered yard equipment in general and leaf blowers in particular.  The latter are particularly interesting, because do we really need such things?    My neighborhood is seldom without noise from them, and I did grow up thinking it was normal for trees to have leaves under them, and if not acceptable, there was always the rake.  Stanford’s campus is rather remarkable, in that it has a large number of trees, but almost no leaves on the ground—and apparently few rakes.  We (mostly my wife) are the only people in our area that do our own yard work, which is healthy outdoor exercise.  To us it beats going to gyms, pedaling stationary bicycles, using weight machines, and inhaling other people’s sweat.

 I cannot help thinking of UAV’s buzzing around helping issue speeding tickets (we have an okay balance now between police and speeders),  checking to see if my yard is a fire hazard and whether I need a new roof, checking crowd size or composition, pulling banners advertising sales at the local car dealers, or just providing entertainment to people who want to check out the neighborhood or practice their hobby.  I must admit I am influenced by the fact that Stanford’s medical center helicopter often flies over my house, private planes do their barely muffled thing, and we do live close to the landing patterns of at least two major airports (although the heavyweights do seem now to be quieter than the private planes).  But my life would be more pleasant if early in the game, yard equipment had not been allowed to use two cycle engines, and better yet had been restricted to electrical power or manual labor.  Hopefully we will think ahead more carefully on UAVs If we aren’t careful, we are going to annoyed by technology we don’t really need. Let's think seriously about what really need UAVs for?

 But the good news is that we are still allowed to kill pests such as bedbugs, yellow jackets, mice, rats, moles, and gophers,  Maybe we will be allowed to kill annoying UAVs.  The problem is that unless they are incredibly miniaturized, their falling dead or dying bodies may hurt innocent people.   

Related articles

Drones to fly U.S. skies, FAA approves 1st civilian UAVs

Drones to fly U.S. skies, FAA approves 1st civilian UAVs

War and the Products of Industry

The last few posts I have written have been on this topic. I veered in this direction because I do not think that people think hard enough about the tremendous impact that Defense Department activities have on not only products for the military, but on civilian products and the overall economy. 

 But considering the military side, it seems to me that an interesting thing has happened, in that the availability of consistent and high funding over many years has resulted in technology and resulting products that have invalidated the classic western Clauswitz theory of total war —massive armies and navies slugging it out as in World War II.  So-called weapons of mass destruction (nuclear bombs, bio-chemical weapons) have made the potential cost in property and lives of civilian as well as members of the military ridiculously high on both sides of any conflict in which they are used.  It is possible to make treaties banning their use in conflicts between nations, but there is always a risk of desperate usage by dictatorial governments or fanatics under attack.

 Wars (or “police actions”) in which the U.S. has been involved since World War II have remained limited, and have not result in the hoped for “victories”.  And they have often veered toward more eastern theory of wars (read Sun Tsu), which recognize the effectiveness of such things as surprise (Pearl Harbor), ambush,  deception, patience (Mao and Ho Chi Minh}, and avoiding un-winnable battles.  And the nature of battle itself has been drastically changed by the use of air, modern transportation and communication, night vision capability, improved personal arms and armor, observation satellites, computers, and the global positioning satellite system.

 And in the U.S., at least, there is a growing antipathy toward what is euphemistically called collateral damage, as well as military casualties, and it is about time, since the civilian casualty count in modern wars is often larger than that of the military, and the civilians are in a sense innocent by-standers.  The present uproar about drone attacks, in which relatively few people are killed is a symptom of this antipathy.  Though the casualties are relatively few, they seem to violate our sense of fairness.  They are the opposite of Gary Cooper and the one-on-one duel in the classic movie High Noon.

 I certainly do not claim to know the answer to this.  The Cold War period was a period of relative peace, but high anxiety.  I understand the desire of nations to possess nuclear weapons, since for better or worse, they definitely help in becoming recognized as a power to be reckoned with (North Korea?).  The League of Nations failed, and the U.N. and the world court seem to have only limited power.  And leaders of nations, even though they deny it, seem to like to fight. Do we need a new type of war?   Now there is an opportunity for creativity.    

Immortal Avatars—Bad Product Idea

The Sunday June 2 New York Times had an article in the Business Section entitled "This Man is Not a Cyborg. Yet."  I assume that it is the kind of an article that weekend newspapers run if nothing much of global interest is happening.  In brief, Dmitry Itskov, a wealthy 32 year old Russian, is devoting his life to pursing a dream, in which large numbers of cheap avatars will be manufactured and equipped with digital copies of our brains, complete with consciousness, personality, and undoubtedly memory.

There is a  belief entitled Technological Determinism, which is that if it is technologically feasible, it will happen.  This is not always good.  In fact, it is often bad.  Let us assume, although it will be difficult, that it will become technically possible to make cheap avatars and equip them with digital copies of our brain.  Mr. Itskov, believes this will lead to lifetimes of many hundreds, if not thousands of years, and we will be released from the petty worries of day to day living.  Incidentally, he is perhaps a bit extreme, but not alone among people of wealth, especially those associated with science and technology, who like the media are titillated by a potentially much longer life span.  Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and possessor of a net worth of many billions of dollars, is funding a foundation to do research on extending life, and many believe that he may be somewhat interested in his own.

 But supposing Mr. Itskov’s goal becomes feasible in 2045 (his schedule).  I can easily think up a few non-technical questions.

 1.     Who is going to maintain Mr. Itzkov’s avatar?.  Tax money?  Perhaps other avatars could, but if equipped with human minds, would they? He could probably endow  his avatar’s upkeep, but if this is to be the routine, will only wealthy people live thousands of years? In my opinion there are enough of them around already,  Where would avatars live?  I don’t want any in my neighborhood.

2.     How will Mr. Itskov decide when to fire up his avatar?  Will he do it when his avatar becomes available?  If he is on schedule he will be 64.  Or will he wait until he is feeling the onslaught of dementia to do so?  Will he use his wealth to download his brain into hundreds of avatars?  Will he turn off his flesh and blood body when his brain is downloaded? If not, what happens when it gets into an argument with his avatar?  Would he turn off his body if he was his present age?

3.     Most people I know love their parents, but when their parents die, after a time of mourning, there is a certain feeling of increased independence.  What would it be like to have avatar parents around for thousands of years?  Or an ex spouse?

4.     What rights will avatars have?  Will flesh and blood humans outrank them? When avatars are several hundred years old and still have brains fueled with ancient ideas will it be okay to remove their battery packs?  Or will that  be murder?  Will it be acceptable for avatars to download the brains of flesh and blood humans into an avatar and discard the human?

5.     What if cheap avatar bodies don’t work as well as flesh and blood ones?  Will the brain be frustrated with the body for thousand of years?  Sounds even worse than bad knees.

 Apparently many people think Mr. Itskov is insane.  I don’t think so.  I think that he is probably an idealistic  young guy with a lot of money who has not found a life yet.  Or maybe he likes to make a splash—after all, he was a media mogul.  In the interim, he will be popular with the “improve the human” set.

 I personally love life, have an infinite number of projects,  and do not want to die, and when the time comes I will fight it as well as I can in the traditional way.  But I do believe that it is our duty to get out of the way when we lose the fight, without inflicting ourselves on society for thousands of years. In particular, I would be even more of a pain over those thousands of  years if I were not diverted by the petty worries of day to day living.

 

 

 

The digital world and white collar jobs

 The Schumpeter article in the May 35-31, 2013 edition of The Economist deals with white-collar unemployment, a topic of increasing concern.  In 2011 Brynjolfsson and McAfee at MIT’s Sloan Business School wrote a book entitled “Race Against the Machine”in which they predicted that many knowledge ("white collar") workers were facing future problems because computers would continue to take over more jobs than they would create.  The Economist article references this book and also a study by the McKenzie Global Institute, entitled “Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy”, which takes the more popular line that this will be good for us, because as computers take over more repetitive tasks, workers will be free to become more productive, although it does admit that increased inequality, social exclusion, and backlashes may result, and that present institutions may have trouble keeping up with these advances.

I am with Brynjolfsson and McAfee. Perhaps that is partly because I grew up in a small-farm agricultural environment, went to a large vocational high school, and have worked in oil fields and machine shops, been in the military, and now spend time in California’s Central Valley, which is quite different than Silicon Valley. All of these contain people who don’t seem likely to smoothly transition to becoming knowledge workers dealing with complex problems, and who are now knowledge workers whose jobs contain much that is becoming increasingly automated—the same is true of Silicon Valley, but people don't talk about it as much.

In my experience, the human race not only contains a large number of people who don’t want to be knowledge workers, even if given the opportunity, but an equal, if not larger number of knowledge workers that either already are being replaced by computers, or will be in the future.  Many of these folk  don’t seem to want to be “educated” to do less routine work, because after all, there is pleasure in being an expert, whether at growing corn or drawing up trusts. Despite the biases or those of us in the education business, many people do not seem to love learning new tricks and do not consider working on intractable problems as captivating.

As examples, of imperiled white collar jobs, much of the contact I have had with attorneys has been over common issues— simple wills and trusts, and a straight forward divorce (California, a no-fault, community property state). Although I liked the attorneys personally, much of this might have been simpler without them. For instance, when the divorce process began, a friend gave me a sheet of paper with the average settlement in marriages of our type in our county as a function of length of marriage, income, number of children, etc. I proposed we use this to my then wife, and she seemed to accept it, but some of her friends cautioned her to get a “tough” lawyer, because surely otherwise, she would be ripped off by me. I talked to a friend who was then Dean of the Stanford Law School, and he suggested that I get an attorney to negotiate with her attorney, except I didn’t need a “tough” one, because this was all routine.

The result was a year of jousting personally and by mail, increasingly bad feelings between me and my then wife, and worry about what the result might be, culminating in a trial. The judge, surprised that a resolution had not been reached, summoned both attorneys to his chambers, and they returned looking a bit chastened and holding the same piece of paper I had been handed by my friend a year earlier, which turned out to be the finding of the court. Jeez. It seems to me that a piece of software could have done the legal work without nearly the trauma, and there is adequate trauma and expense in divorce without adding to it by injecting battling attorneys.

Similarly, I have had quite a bit of unwanted contact with people wanting to charge me for planning my financial future, who I suspect are relying on financial planning software to do so, and people wanting me to pay them to figure out my income tax, undoubtedly using MacinTax or equivalent. So yes, I think we have a problem. As the public becomes more computer literate and software becomes easier to use, we are going to have increasing difficulty in providing satisfying and reasonably paying jobs to lots of white collar workers as well as factory workers, and probably the result will be even louder outrage as the situation affects people who are capable of making more noise.

Perhaps this is underestimated by people at McKenzie and in the media, because they probably got good grades in school, like working on problems that do not have right answers, are good hustlers, and are confident that most white collar workers are like them and can always find satisfying and lucrative jobs as computers continue to encroach upon their territory.

Product Quality and Service

Are you ever impressed at how few people seem to work in “big box” stores?  I was at one time entertained by Home Depot ads that featured mellow older clerks who were expert in some field of building (plumbing, wiring, framing, etc) and who would be pictured patiently explaining the process to less expert customers.  I would like to find a big box store like that.  In many, one is lucky to run down any employee in the store, and if one succeeds, there are usually several people trying to get their attention, and one is lucky if they even know where things are, much less how to use them.

 I often meet people, who having heard about the service sector domination of the economy (it is estimated that 70% of all wage earners work in the service sector, as opposed to manufacturing or such things as agriculture, fishing, and mining) wonder why “service” is so lousy in the U.S.  My wife happily quotes a comment she read at some time, that in England service is a tradition, in Japan it is an honor, and in the U.S. it is an insult. But such comments and reactions are based on the belief that service is about helping ordinary people through the day, not running a derivatives firm on Wall Street.

 I have an unabridged Webster dictionary, which I love.  It has two thousand and some pages of very fine print (three columns per page, ten words per line in each column), and I love it partly because of the amazing amount of effort that had to go into compiling it.  But also, because it contains the common meanings of words, and these days we seem to be happily trying to re-define words to fit our contemporary needs. This dictionary contains almost two columns under service, and almost 50 definitions.  The definitions in the first half column do in fact refer to people helping people.  Only in the middle does one come across such things as “useful labor that does not produce a tangible commodity”.  Here we move into the economic realm.  But I think most people consider service to be help from other people, whether it be in person, in manuals, on the internet, or whatever.  And I agree we could do much better.

 Without help, we tend to buy the cheapest product, which may be of the lowest quality.  I notice when I shop for tools with a friend who has spent his life as a mechanic, I spend more money and get better stuff. I no longer buy the cheapest house paint, because I don’t like to paint the house that often.  The internet is becoming less trustworthy as it becomes more commercial, so I have switched to asking house-painters about paint quality.  It would be better if I could trust sales people in paint stores to give me the straight poop.  Somehow they are all convinced that their paint is the best.  I bought a combination (always risky) toaster oven-toaster a while ago and it is a disaster, even though the sales person raved about it.  In retrospect, he probably wanted me to buy it and knew nothing about it.

 Higher quality requires more informed and honest information about products.  It doesn’t have to come from personal contact, but personal contact is nice, and would make a lot of jobs.

Evgeny Morozov "To Save Everything Click Here" book

I mentioned this book in a post a bit ago, and announced that I had ordered it and would report on it.  The book was  deeper and more thought provoking than I expected, so I have just finished it.  I thoroughly agree with the first comment on the back, by Bruce Sterling, which reads “For the brilliant dissident Evgeny Morozov, computers are like broken beach-toys on the dark, historic tides of power  politics.  His new book should be bound in sandpaper and used to abrade the works of other Internet pundits”. Clicking on the appropriate image in the recommended readings to the right will give more information on the book.

 But the book is far from a rant.  Morozov has an interesting viewpoint, since he grew up in Belarus as the Soviet Union was unraveling, and has gone from a born-again believer in the power of the Internet to being a critic.  His understanding of the internet is obvious, as are his hopes that it will better aid the cause of liberal democracy.

 The book is beautifully written and argued, and in my mind overdue. His last book, entitled “The Net Delusion”, concerned the use of the Internet initially as a tool to overthrow dictators and support democracy, but later as a tool by these various dictators to strengthen their grip by such things as enhancing their propaganda ability and identifying and destroying opposition.  This, of course, was an unwelcome message to those who believe that the internet will cause all seven billion of us to understand each other, agree on important issues, and, to borrow a word that is losing its very meaning because of the Internet, be friends.

 In this new book, he first of all takes a swing at what he calls Solutionism — the belief that everything can (and should) be made “better” (often defined by the solutionist).  He singles out engineers as being staunch believers in this, and being one, I think we are guilty.  He does an excellent job of demonstrating that some things. such as politics, have been criticized for as long as recorded history, but they don’t seem to have been replaced by any of the  communication “miracles” or other technological “breakthroughs” of the past.  In fact, he argues in favor of the very human and messy character of much large-scale human interaction, and although he believes that the Internet is an important tool in aiding these interactions, he obviously does not believe in its ability to replace such things.   

 His next argument is against changing our societies to match the present structure and goals of the Internet .  It is, after all, a work in progress, and our activities should not be structured and simplified to fit its present abilities. I very much resonate to his argument.  At one point in my Stanford career I became chair of the then struggling program in Science, Technology, and Society.  I learned, to my surprise and pleasure, that even though I had practiced and taught engineering for 30 years, I knew very little about the history and character of technology, or about the unsuccessful history of movements often described as technocracy.

 One rule of thumb often used by historians of technology is that it takes at least 50 years for a new technology to mature.  I am a believer.  My first brush with computers was about 50 years ago, and it consisted of giving structures problems to a programmer who in turn would feed my problems to a large mainframe, which resulted in an answer after several days.  Look at where we are now.  But yet we are just scratching the surface of how to use them in a way that is more consistent with society. The internet has been under construction for over 50 years, but the World Wide Web, which made the Internet accessible to most of us, dates from 1989. That was only 25 years ago.  Such things as social networking and attempting to combine unbiased information with marketing are in their infancy.  The internet will continue to develop, and must do so in a direction that better serves humans, or it will become a more complex version of network TV. 

 The majority of the book is full of cases, stories, and predictions of problems that have and will result from too much belief in what Morozov calls cyber-utopianism.  I am going to talk more about this book and the internet in my next post, but anyone making use of the Internet, and especially people designing and manufacturing the software and hardware involved in it, should read the book, not rely on me to interpret it.  I found it a very impressive work, whether one agrees with the author or not (many in Silicon Valley will not), and am jealous that I cannot write books like it. 

 

 

 

 

Problem solving, the internet, and Evgeny Morozov

This post is a bit late because I lost my wallet for the first time in my life this weekend, and have been spending my time ever since communicating with banks, AAA, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and various other agencies which I need to cancel things and send me new ones.  DO NOT EVER LOSE  YOUR WALLET.  In fact, take it out now and remove everything that you don’t regularly use and that you would have to replace if you lost the damn thing—especially if you would have to deal with the DMV.   It turns out that lots of people have lost theirs or had it stolen at some time or another—they just don’t admit it until you let them know you are a member of the club.

 In my next post I will bring you up on the final student presentations in the Stanford Good Products Bad Products course.  The first four were very good indeed.  But in this post I would like to say a few words about an article in the March 3 New York Times that I found both provocative, and enjoyable.  The title of the article was “The Perils of Perfection”, by Evgeny Morozov, and it is here.

 I enjoyed it because living in the midst of the Stanford /Silicon Valley success story, I am surrounded by people and companies extremely enthusiastic and optimistic about the long-term wonderful effects upon humankind of computers and internet and their ability to handle important and difficult social problems. This article is drawn on a book entitled “To Save Everything, Click Here:  The Folly of Technological Solutionism”. (Morozov also wrote “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of the Internet”.)  I find his critical attitude toward the wonders of the internet to be a wonderful counterpoint to the general values of my environment.

 I like the description of engineers as “solutionists”.   It is to some extent true.  I have a good  friend who is an eminent historian (Pulitzer Prize, etc.).  He refers to engineers as “meddlers” rather than “solutionists”.  He and his fellow historians feel that they are trying to understand societies, and engineers are knowingly or unknowingly trying to change them. I am an engineer and have worked all of my professional life finding solutions to problems. To  the extent that I have succeeded I have been a meddler.  But these problems have been relatively straight-forward, and solutions could be found that pleased most people involved.  I do not believe that all problems have solutions of this sort, and certainly not solutions that please everyone {the "perfect" solution}.  Congress is finding that out with regard to problems having to do with medical care, employment, balancing the budget, etc.etc.etc.  What improves the situation for some, makes it worse for others.  Complicated situations involving manyp eople can be improved, but perfect “right” answers are unlikely.

 There is much hope among some of the digerati that ever increasing communication (social networking) and new software allowing the formation of independent political groups and poll-taking (Morozov mentions a software program named Seesaw) will allow answers to be found that will result in solutions to such complicated and critical problems that will please all. I don’t, because different human values and interests are involved and if some people are pleased, others won’t be. Taxes are a good example.

 Morozov goes further and quotes from an essay named “In Praise of Inconsistency” written by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski,  The  author of this feels that disagreement among  people as to the proper course to take is “the only hope for the human race”.  I won’t go further.  Read and think about Morizov’s essay in the  link above.  I have ordered the book.  I will use it to pick on students and my friends who have been born again by the internet.

Product Quality and Population

Some day there will be a gravestone some place that will read  “here lies James L. Adams, a kind and caring man, who died from a heart attack in stalled traffic”.  I hate being trapped in such things, aware of my life ticking away and helpless to do anything about it. One of the blessings of being retired, is the ability to choose driving times when crowds are at a minimum.  But this takes some thinking, because where I live the commuting periods are long (flex time and lots of people commuting to work in Silicon Valley ), and many people are on the road shopping and going to restaurants around lunch time.  At times like these, the traffic is terrible.

 But the other day I needed to be in the Sacramento Valley in the morning and back at Stanford by 5:00 p.m., with a few interim stops thrown in.  The trip was only possible by car.  I left at 5:30 a.m., which let me beat the commuting traffic pretty well, although the incoming traffic was already bumper to bumper and moving slowly because of people living far away in more affordable housing but working in the valley.  But coming back I could not beat the traffic, ran out of back roads, and got caught.

I escaped my heart attack by musing about once good products that were no longer compatible with increased population density.  The automobile is a truly sophisticated product in many ways —capable of carrying one long distances at high speeds in comfort. Still great if one drives around Eastern Oregon or West Texas—less great shopping in New York City or commuting in Los Angeles (photo by Monica Almeida/The New York Times). If too many of them are put together it becomes a terrible product – a small cell enclosing one and barely moving, if at all, while it pollutes the ecosphere, devours petroleum, and causes one to endure unhealthy changes in one’s vital signs and exhibit sometimes violently anti-social behavior.  The present move toward “autonomous” vehicles is probably partly motivated by the fantasy that traffic will move more rapidly and one can entertain oneself by drinking, texting, watching TV, and sleeping as one is transported to work and back.  But it may also have the effect of depriving the traveler of diversion and allow him/her more free time to curse and extend one’s middle finger toward others.

 There are many products that work well in less populated areas (firearms, un-muffled engines, weed burners,) but not well in cities.  Can you think of a few? This probably explains some of the differences in attitudes of people (and our good congressional representatives) toward such issues as high speed railroads and the environment. I would guess that people drilling for oil and gas in North Dakota experience less criticism than those who built platforms off of the shore of Santa Barbara California. And shooting game birds in Wyoming farmland is more acceptable than shooting pigeons in San Francisco’s  Union Square.

 I would also guess that some of the resistance people have to ever tightening regulations might result from having grown up in more sparsely populated areas and who remember freedoms that are no longer acceptable in densely populated ones.   Even I am sometimes guilty of such behavior.  I could better get away with throwing the garbage out of the back door in my youth (when there were chickens and orange trees there rather than neighbors) than in my present yard in an upscale community, even though garbage is good compost. And how can people have the nerve to prevent me from using my fireplace?  Fireplaces were wonderful products when I grew up in an agricultural area – family and social centers and cheery winter heating.  Apparently not so good in suburban Santa Clara Valley, California these days.

 

 

 

 

Product Quality, Invention, Innovation, Economics, and Outsourcing.

  There were a couple of provocative articles in the last issue of The Economist.  The first and lead article is here.  It has to do with the present swell of interest in ideas, creativity, innovation, and such things.  I had  two reactions to it.  First, I certainly agree that such things are essential to us.  But there seems to be a feeling nowadays that lots of ideas are magic that can result in gloriously successful startups that then result in our fantasy of full employment, rapidly growing GDP, etc. etc. etc.  As mathematicians might say, ideas are necessary but not sufficient.  Linus Pauling, my beloved freshman chemistry teacher, used to say that the key to creativity is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones.  When this appears as a quote, somehow the last part of the sentence is often omitted.

 The second gives a bit of insight into our national policy vagueness on manufacturing.   It is here.  It discusses the field of economics, the extent at which economists agree with each other, and the extent that the public agrees with the economists.  It includes the figure shown below.

 Each week since Sept 1911, the University of Chicago has asked a group  of economists associated with leading schools whether they agree or disagree on certain statements.  The figure, taken from an article entitled “Economic Experts vs. Average Americans”, written by Paula Sapienz and Luigi Zingales, also of the University of Chicago, compares these responses with  those of a group of non-economists, who seem to be "comparable" to the economists in most respects.  One might expect the non-economists to have  somewhat similar responses to those of the economists, since we are, after all, intelligent and well informed and the economists are highly trained  professionals in topics having to do with money. The economists generally agree with each other reasonably well, despite their tendency to attack each other in the media.  But the non-economists do not seem to agree with them.

With regard to manufacturing, look at the difference in response to the bottom statement —The “Buy American” policy is good for manufacturing employment”.  A mere ten percent of the economists agree with that.  A resounding 75 percent  of the non-economists do.  The public in a democracy such as ours is assumed to be reasonably intelligent.  So are specialists such as economists.  Does this explain Washington to some extent?  And us?  All of the economists seem to agree that “It is hard to predict stock prices”.  Only half of the non-economists seem to agree. And how about the one on the cost of methods to cut emissions?

 

 

Manufacturing, Skills, and Education

The media seems to have gotten the message that there are many jobs available in manufacturing for “adequately skilled” people.  The Nov 24-Nov 30 issue of The Economist has an article entitled “The New Maker Rules” that discusses this. 

 When I first began work as an engineer, “skills” referred to things having to do with hands and eyes, learned through practice.  Now “skills” seem to also imply competence with mathematics, science, and such things as computer programming, typically learned through formal schooling.  So maybe we are finally realizing the advantages of bringing theory and practice back together a bit.  It’s about time.

 In my next blog, I am going to talk a bit about a group of people at Stanford that call themselves the Product Realization Laboratory, and are led by Professor David Beach, that have been emphasizing this for years.  They are part of the Design Group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and if you like a quick glimpse at what they do, look at their web site here.  But to my mind, they are undervalued in the academy, even though the students who go through their program are just what the U.S. manufacturing industry needs.

 We are not going to get these “adequately skilled” people unless we make some major changes in our industries and educational institutions, and embarrassingly enough, some of them seem to require turning the clock back a bit. 

 I have these “adequate” skills, but I was fortunate enough to have several resources at my disposal, all now rare.  First of all I grew up on a farm which included a machinist uncle (four year apprenticeship in those days) and a blacksmith grandfather.  Much of the equipment and many of the tools on the farm were to some extent made, and all were maintained, by my uncle and grandfather, with me being allowed (required) to help.  I did not go to a school system oriented toward preparing people for college, but I not only took a fair amount of math and science (because I liked it) and took courses in wood shop and metal shop (including what was then called mechanical drawing) through high school.  My high school, incidentally, included a very broad array of vocational programs ranging from such things as auto shop and machine shop through printing shop, painting shop,  and plaster shop to boys foods and boys tailoring. Thinking I wanted to be a machinist, I worked my final summer in a large machine shop as a flunky, despite a bit of pressure to work on the farm

 My counselor sent me off to Caltech, which at that time was quite active in building large instruments and included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (still the case).  Summers I worked in the same large shop, but gradually was moved into their small engineering section (which was made up of people who had “come up through the ranks” as machinists (no graduates of four year engineering programs— these were perhaps the “adequately skilled” people in demand right now).

 When I graduated from Caltech, companies were typically offering two year training programs for their new engineers, in which they would be moved around through several activities and would learn company-related skills.  I almost went to work for a machine tool company named Warner Swasey, in which I would have been hired as an engineer at the appropriate salary, but would have spent my first two years working in their very impressive shops.  Instead I went to Shell Oil Company as a production engineer, but even though I graduated first in engineering in my class, and was being paid a satisfying salary as an engineer, I began working in the field as a roustabout (pick and shovel), then was part of a well work-over crew, and then a member of a drilling crew. I left after a few months for active duty in the Air Force, but intended to return and finish my two years at a series of other training activities designed to help me apply what I had learned at Caltech to the company— in other words to learn the oil game.  I never did return to Shell, but this was not uncommon, and companies seemed to be willing to conduct training programs whether people left or not, on the grounds that industry in general would benefit.

 It takes  a lot of work and time to acquire the range of knowledge and experience desired in future manufacturing workers.  Schools are being expected to produce students that do better on math and science tests, but these tests do not measure ability to apply the knowledge.  Industries expect schools to deliver graduates who already have a good sense of  what they like to call “the real world” without much training.  Both have to do better.  And working in manufacturing must be made a more appealing career in the U.S.  Would you rather have your kid work in a factory, or in financial services?

 

Intelligence, Training, and Employment

 A Stanford Professor named Gerald Crabtree recently published a two part paper in the journal Trends in Genetics suggested that evolution is making us dumber.  An article about it from Time Newsfeed is here.                 .

 The article resulted in a great amount of conversation on the internet, pro and con.  Many people used events they disagree with (the election, etc.) to prove he is right.  Many disagreed with him.  I am of the latter camp.  I have never thought we humans are as smart as we think we are.  Nor do I place much faith in the way we try to measure intelligence. But I think that life is getting more complex as our population and our desires increase, and that we are becoming less capable of dealing with it.  Moore’s law says that the number of devices on integrated circuits doubles about every two years.  The number of neurons in the adult human brain definitely does not. But I don't think it is decreasing.

 I seem to often agree with New York Times columnist  Thomas Friedman, and this was the case with his editorial in the November 18^th edition, entitled “If You’ve Got the Skills, She’s got the Job.”  He begins by writing about Traci Tapani and her sister, who  are co-presidents of Wyoming Machine, a metal shop in Stacy, Minnesota, and have had difficulty in hiring people of the skill level they need—in particular welders.  As she says about the applicants for her work, “They could make beautiful welds, but they did not understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques, and how different metals and gases, pressures, and temperatures had to be combined”  As she also explained, her company does a wide variety of small high technology jobs, so her welders must be able to read and understand a number of complicated design drawings per day.  The article goes on to talk about the need for higher skills, and the need for educational institutions to deliver them.

 I had an uncle who spent his career as a machinist and then a shop superintendent.  He began in 1932 with a four year apprenticeship, and when he retired at the age of 65, the same machines that he had learned on (with some improvements)  were still being used. Little computer aided design, few digitally controlled machining centers, no plasma cutters, and certainly no 3d printers. I learned to work metal on essentially the same machines my uncle did, and in fact still use a Bridgeport mill (with no digital control), a South Bend Lathe (with all manual controls), and things like Vernier Calipers.  But my shop is more of an antique than a symbol of modern practice. Design used to be done with pencils, not powerful computers.  Most manufacturing used to consist of relatively simple cutting, bending, casting, and welding of metals such as steel and aluminum, and did not include such things as photolithography and computer controlled robots.  Welders could get by with hand, eye, and experience.  No longer.  As Traci Tapani says in the Friedman article, “If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day.  As Friedman says “Who knew, welding is now a STEMS job—that is a  job that requires knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and math. The photo here is of me doing some mig welding (I know, without adequate protective clothing).  I know science, technology, engineering, and math.  Maybe I should build up my welding skills and apply for a job with Traci.

  In design and manufacturing, not only has theory become more complex, but increasing creativity and business ability is being required of those involved. New materials and processes, expectations of performance, light weight, and precision, and the increasing sophistication of technology and technical products, are simply raising the bar on what is required to work in many areas. When I was a simple mechanical engineer involved in making spacecraft 50 years ago, I didn’t have to deal with such things as carbon filaments, integrated circuits, software bugs, and additive manufacturing. 

 I may have become somewhat dumber.  But the game  has definitely become more difficult.  And simultaneously, not only have vocational courses in schools in areas having to do with manufacturing not kept up, but such programs, along with rigorous training programs in industry (four year apprenticeships?), are disappearing fast. Lowering unemployment requires both improving the economy and much more training.  And making better products requires more education and  higher skill levels.

 

 

 

 

Product Quality, Complacency, and the Presidential Election

I run into general agreement that companies often overlook possible breakthroughs and gains in product quality because of complacency—“we have done great for many years, so why put effort and money into change? Let’s stay with what we know how to do".

 In the Oct 21 New York Times there was a thought-provoking article entitled “The Opiate of Exceptionalism", by Scott Shane.  It is about politics, and in particular this election.  He begins by reminding us of the low U.S.rankings in many measures of success (child poverty, educational achievements, infant mortality, incarceration of our citizens, behind most of Europe, Australia, and Canada in social mobility, etc. etc. etc.).  He then goes into the meat of the article, which is that politicians who place too much emphasis on the details of our problems do not get elected.

We prefer not to dwell on our problems in depth. We are confident that we will overcome them without too much pain.  We even hear the words “American Exceptionalism”, which imply that there is something unusual about us that makes us better than other nations.  That is a risky belief, because history has shown it not to be true.  The rise and fall of empires has been consistent, and generally unexpected by the people in them. It is easy to find people in England the former Soviet Union, and even France who are stilll baffled as to why the world no longer considers them a superpower. Of course the U.S. is more exceptional………………….

 We want our presidential candidates to reassure us that they have simple and relatively painless solutions to our problems.  Unfortunately, solutions to many of our problems are neither simple nor painless, nor will they make everyone happy.  They are solvable, but that requires that we work together, and keep our eyes on the future and not on the past —two things that are not always easy for large numbers of people to do.   It is interesting to review Abe Lincoln's “A House Divided Cannot Stand” speech, which was thought to be politically risky when given. I think of it occasionally when the  U.S. Congress doesn't seem to be able to get out of its own way.

 The tendency for complacency is deep within human DNA, and  serves a purpose, because it helps us diminish worry, and feel good about our lives.  It is satisfying to have been involved in many years of producing large bore V-8 engines of ever increasing horsepower.  We can overlook efficiency because there will always be available cheap gasoline, right?  More oil will be discovered, right, coal can be converted to gasoline cleanly, biofuels will become cheap, Canadian tar sand gasoline will drop in price, right?

 Complacency also makes us feel good about ourselves.  We are losing our competitive advantage in manufacturing, but we are smarter, more innovative, more entrepreneurial, and better at business than people in other countries, right?   And of course, our products will be of higher quality than anyone else’s as soon as we quit outsourcing.  Made in the USA will reign supreme again.  Not that easy. 

Globalization is here to stay, and many other countries are in pursuit of increased overall product quality. And they have the skills and motivation to succeed.  I agree with Shane’s article and believe we should encourage our political candidates and ourselves to go more deeply into our problems, and I think our companies to think harder about product quality. As my daddy used to say, nobody owes us a living.  And as we all should know, you have to work hard to be exceptional.  It doesn’t automatically come with your citizenship, race, gender, past performance, I.Q, size, or appearance.

If you would like to read a well-written article concerning complacency, read Malcolm Gladwell's July 27 2009 New Yorker article about the psychology of overconfidence entitled "Cocksure".  It is here.

Off the topic, if you would like a thought provoking article on whether there will ever be cheap gasoline again, try this one.

Product Quality, Outsourcing, and China

  Listening to the presidential debate the other night, I was taken by some comments that Mitt Romney made about China “cheating”, how their currency was undervalued, how if necessary we would protect our vital industries by such things as tariffs, etc.  I realize that politicians like to say short simple things that voters like to hear, and I don’t know how much contact Mr. Romney has with Chinese companies, but give me a break.

 Many people in the U.S. resent China, because they see it taking over manufacturing, which we feel we should dominate forever.  But China probably felt that way about Britain when it took over the lead, and Britain obviously felt that way about the U.S. when we did.  Nations tend to take the lead in manufacturing when they have the understanding of the pertinent technology, access to cheap but intelligent and motivated labor and low-cost resources, and the desire at all levels from workers to heads of government. China has all of that in large quantities. And perhaps more people in China are satisfied with the opportunities in manufacturing as opposed to the fantasy of  making big money quickly through finance or entrepreneurship. 

 Since the U.S. likes to believe that it deserves being the best at everything, it is easy to feel that China must be cheating if it successfully competes with us.  But by whose rules?  Traditionally the Chinese have not believed as strongly as we do that individuals have ownership of intellectual property.  Despite their success in manufacturing, they are still a poor country, albeit with a long and impressive history and a huge population.  Their capitalism is state run, and we believe they should be a democracy.  But even the last issue of The Economist is worrying about capitalism in the “developed” world being a bit out of control.  And India (which has a comparable population) is more of a democracy than China, but has traditionally had trouble agreeing as a nation.  If we were China, would we act differently than it is acting?

 China will undoubtedly follow the path of all countries who have had a dramatic rise in manufacturing ability (Japan and Germany after World War II) and reach a point in which wages rise with increasing national wealth and success, motivation declines because of the “good life”, and Chinese companies begin building factories in the U.S. as Japanese and European companies do. It is already outsourcing to many other countries.   It will probably continue to improve at manufacturing, and producing higher quality indigenous products, and we should do the same, rather than waste our effort trying to slow it down.

 As far as outsourcing, it is somewhat a function of tax structure and labor cost, but also it occurs because it is possible to get better service and work in other countries.  Apple likes Foxconn because they respond instantly to changes from Cupertino, and because they dependably produce very high quality products.  Their labor costs are low, but this is not the main consideration, because what they earn is a minor portion of the cost of an i-Phone.  I was recently talking to a friend and ex student who is a manager at Tesla and trying hard to source in the U.S. He finally found a vendor in Ohio who could do a good job of casting a complicated part, but they unfortunately could not machine it within requirements.  So he resorted to a Taiwanese company (he too is worried about China) that rapidly gave him what he needed.  If you look at what China has done in areas such as aerospace and is doing in industries ranging from heavy construction to alternate energy, it is becoming very good in many aspects of technology.  And as I keep saying, good wins.

 It is true that outsourcing is affected by tax structure.  Companies now often can win financially by manufacturing overseas, and the result is the loss of potential jobs at home.  But tariffs lose.  As nations such as India have found out, they do initially protect industries, but over time the industries tend to lose their ability to compete globally.  As to the Renminbi being too low in value, it will rise, but in the meantime, it works for China and how do we know that the dollar is not overvalued?  In any case, we probably would not respond favorably if the European Union tried to get us to change the dollar’s value to discourage people from importing so many U.S. products.  And “cheap “ imported products have certainly benefited consumers.  I am reminded of a New Yorker Cartoon of a few years ago, which portrayed a shoe-store display window with a sign saying something like “Athletic Shoes Made Entirely in the U.S.A.—$240 per pair”.

 As a final possible clue to China’s success in manufacturing, last time I looked, eight out of nine top government leaders in China could claim to be engineers or scientists. As an engineer, I think engineers and scientists are good people to have around when manufacturing is concerned. And  as you probably know, China claims to be producing some 600,000 engineers per year, as opposed to our 70,000.  Arguments have been made that they lie, and anyway these are not of the quality of U.S. engineers, and are in fact often what we would call technicians or graduates from two-year programs.  But we are talking manufacturing here.  Technicians with engineering knowledge are more than useful, as are people with two-year degrees.  The Chinese engineering students studying in the U.S. are of course not typical, but they are generally outstanding. 

 And we also tend to judge engineers through the value systems of people who are involved in university education.  I am a member of the faculty of one of the top ranked U.S. engineering schools, and I could easily find you experts on our faculty on such topics as nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotech, and analytical decision making.  And most of them love research and supervising Ph.D. students.  But I am not sure I could find you anyone whose expertise includes designing a factory, or even a production line.

I am presently trying to give a little help to an old friend at Stanford, Professor David Beach, to help him raise the visibility and support level of his long-established and outstanding program, which is called the Product Realization Lab (school words) and is all about integrated design and manufacturing, with perhaps an emphasis on manufacturing.  It is a struggle.  In most of our highly ranked engineering schools, science rules, not manufacturing.

 

More comments on Peter Marsh's "The New Industrial Revolution"

In his book “The New Industrial Revolution”, Peter Marsh paints an optimistic picture of the future.  As I said in my last post, he feels that manufacturing will continue to become more global, that different areas and cultures will find advantageous roles in different aspects of manufacturing, and that more and more countries will go through rapid rises in manufacturing through the path from low wages to high value added.  However, over time he predicts that wage difference will decrease, skill levels and education will increase, and other than proximity to customers, there will be fewer reasons to manufacture outside of the home country of businesses.  To him, the uniqueness of the “New Industrial Revolution”, over previous ones, has not only to do with more sophisticated technology, but also that it will affect the entire world, rather than a single or a few countries

He predicts that “richer” areas will tend toward research and design of products, and “poorer” ones toward production, as is already the case.  Some areas will specialize in the production of products requiring manual work, and others will move toward even more automation.  Some areas will produce higher cost and more customized products, and others will count on toward traditional mass production. All of this assumes, of course, that countries are not driven by national hubris to attempt to interrupt the process through political and/or military means, or protectionism, which has historically been shown to have very negative long-term effects. 

But in thinking about his book, I became increasingly impressed at the misleading character of the overall numbers we use to measure national success in global ventures,  This is particularly true with overall trade balance numbers. For instance, our use of GDP rather than GNP lumps production in factories in a country together, independently of ownership.  As an example, our scoring system considers all products produced in China as “Chinese”, even though a quarter of the manufacturing in China is controlled by non-Chinese owned businesses (many U.S.), and does not take account of the elaborate nature of global value chains.

Marsh gives an interesting example in his book by breaking down the dollar flow from Apple iPhones, which receive much attention for being “built” in China. In 2009, the listed value of the Chinese export of iPhones to the U.S. totaled approximately $2 billion, enough to promote significant anti-China feelings among those oriented in such a direction. According to his figures, the factory transfer price (paid by Apple to Foxconn, for instance) was $179 each. But these phones contained $121.5 million of components made by US companies and exported to China to be included in the finished product.  Only $6.50, or 3% of the transfer price was for assembly.  The remaining $172.50 in each phone was for components coming not only from the U.S., but also from other countries such as Japan, Korea, and Germany.  Looking at these figures, Marsh calculates that the trade balance to the U..S. could be seen as being $73.5 million paid to Foxconn for the assembly and related engineering effort put into the phones, offset by $121.5 million of U.S. products exported to China, for a net surplus of $48 million in our trade with China, rather than a deficit of approximately 2 billion.  Components from countries other than the U.S. were, of course, indirectly paid for by the U.S. via the $179 transfer fund, but they show up as imports to China, not the U.S.  Sound confusing?  It is to me.   And of course Apple does very well by selling the finished product for approximately $500, so other than our perceived loss of jobs to Foxconn, which provides outstanding service to Apple, how unhappy should we be that the assembly of iPhones is “outsourced” to China?  

When it comes to global manufacturing, if the “New Industrial Revolution” predicted by Marsh continues to take place and global value chains become even more complex, we have to learn to think a bit more deeply about balance of payments, and  more cooperation between nations wiil be necessary, as well as the traditional competition.

 

 

Automation, Work, and Product Quality

As I predicted in my post of  8/17/2012 , Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s book How Much is Enough would annoy some people .  As an example of such annoyance, here is a negative review from the August 19, 2012 Sunday New York Times by Richard Posner, a conservative judge who teaches at the University of Chicago .  But in the same issue of the Times, is an article expounding the improvement in productivity and quality of work from a four day week and increased variation in work.  It is here.  You will like it.  Hopefully Mr. Posner has read it.  In addition, there is a front page article on the use of industrial robots in this issue focusing on the improved capability and decreased cost of modern robots and the resulting effects on employment. I also include it here.

 I am not trying the include the entire  New York Times in my post, but the three articles represent our quandary about work.  There is no question that mechanization eliminates jobs.  It has happened in agriculture, it is happening in industry,  and it will happen increasingly in those functions we call service. And I don’t think that sound bites by politicians will remove the resulting problems. I would bet on a continued increase of mechanization in industry.  And I definitely would  not bet against a shortening of the work week.

I am happy to say that I am not responsible for solving this problem.  But I am interested in what the continued mechanization of manufacturing and assembly and use of computers in design might do to the quality of products.  In 1908 there were 253 automobile manufacturers in the U.S.  Now there are few.  Since that time, the automobile has become standardized to what we see on the road today.  Certainly a higher quality product from the standpoint of  cost, comfort, reliability, and performance.  Yet perhaps we have lost a bit in product diversity, serviceability, and aesthetic/emotional appeal.  It is classic car week in Monterrey, California, and anyone attending this or similar events can get an indication of this.

When I joined the Stanford faculty in the 1960’s, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was experimenting with a purchased manipulator and a couple that a graduate student from mechanical engineering named Vic Scheinman (later to start a manipulator company) had built.  These were primitive devices compared to those now available, but people were definitely thinking about industrial use of such things.  One topic under discussion what whether six degrees of freedom (what we have in the arm and hand) was necessary, or whether fewer would suffice if products were designed to take this into account.

Present day industrial robots can do what we can do when it comes to manufacturing and assembling products.  But will product design change to ease the task of the robots?  Will lower cost more specialized robots result in products that they can assemble more easily, but which will be more difficult for us to service?   Will computers take a greater role in design?  I can see the possibility of further standardization and concern with efficiency of production with concurrent loss of  emotional appeal of products. It would be too bad if increasing use of computers in design and robots in production resulted in products defined more by catering to the abilities of these devices than  for our use and pleasure.  Material for a science fiction book?

 

 

Capitalism and its Limits

I recently read two books that that are getting a good bit of attention and although perhaps only indirectly having to do with product quality, are most thought-provoking and very well written.  If you are a fervent believer in capitalism and the market as being the ultimate mechanisms for fairness, both will annoy you—all the better to read them.  Click on them in the recommended books list for more details.

 The first is What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandell, a professor of government at Harvard.  In it he discusses and questions the proper role of the market in a democratic society and questions how we can prevent everything from being for sale, including those things that perhaps money should not be able to buy.

In the book, Sandel goes through a very large number of examples where money plays a questionable role, ranging from companies such as Linestanders.com, which charge for a “queuing service” that furnishes proxies to wait in line for access to functions including Supreme Court cases and Congress hearings, through paying kids to get good grades, to betting on the death of others (a controversial practice called spin-life) and the explosion of naming rights.

The other book, entitled How Much is Enough—Money and the Good Life, is by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, one a political economist and the other a philosopher,  This one is pointed toward “rich” countries and combines historical and contemporary material that indicate that we are failing to reach a higher quality of life and discusses why that might be.  They feel that capitalism is a powerful mechanism for the creation of wealth, but not especially for its distribution. They question our unquestioning acceptance of measures such as GDP and growth at all levels.  And they feel that we have an unfortunate amount of greed and acquisitiveness, which leads to unstable differences between the rich and the poor and keeps many of us spending a regrettable amount of time acquiring money and goods to the detriment of other perhaps more meaningful things we could be doing.

They approach the problem by defining what the “good life” might consist of, and remind us that the purpose of money is to acquire goods and services, not merely to acquire because it is money.  The book  has a nice mixture of fact, history,  and speculation.

The  present World’s economic problems seems to be resulting in overdue thinking about just what the World’s economy is.  Much of this, including these two books, focuses on the quality of life.  Industrially produced products are clearly part of this.

Andrew Blum and The Hardware of the Internet

I  just read an excellent book (Tubes, by Andrew Blum, published by ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins) that addresses the physical nature of the internet .  It is about the author’s global journey through everything from  hubs, interchanges, cable stations, and data centers to the tiny glass fibers and the lasers that must pulse thousands of billions of times per second.  It has characters, narrative, and even a bit of travelogue as well as information about the hardware - a book by a good writer and journalist whose specialty is technology. My historian wife has even agreed to read it, and I predict she will love it.  It will add depth to her ever-present iphone and ipad.

A subject of great attention these days now seems to be “the cloud”, and since I am an engineer, my friends occasionally ask me about the nature of  this cloud to which computer people refer .  I realize that people who use the term are speaking of information, but to most people, clouds are the white things in the sky, and this cloud is not like water vapor.  It is the use of the internet by companies to provide more services to us, and as this book explains, the internet consists of a very large collection of sometimes messy looking hardware, most of it under ground, on the ocean floor, or in huge, often anonymous, buildings in low-rent districts.

One of my missions in life is to help people understand modern technology, and I think the adoption of  “cloud” is unfortunate.  It is good for the internet service providers, because it lends an air of mystery and god-like importance to them and to the internet, and allows them to provide further services in the form of software and data storage,   But the providers want us in their particular "cloud", and maybe don’t want us to realize that not only is this not a revolutionary concept, but much of the cloud is located in locations such as old rusty tubes next to the sewer under New York streets,  and in hot ugly buildings dominated by the loud noise of cooling fans and cursing technicians splicing glass filaments.  Nor the fact that an estimated 8% of the electrical power in the U. S. is already consumed by the internet.  Real clouds don’t utilize coal for fuel.   

Technological Determinism and Product Quality

 

Technological Determinism is a reductionist theory which considers technology as the major force for social and cultural change.  It is extremely simplistic and generally not accepted.  An argument against it is made in the book “Why Things Bite Back, - The Revenge of  Unintended Consequences”, written by Edward Tenner (Vintage, 1997) .  But there are still many who believe that technology should be allowed to run free, especially among successful people with technical backgrounds.  The May 2012 Wired Magazine  cover features a picture of Marc Andreessen, overlaid with “The Man who Makes the Future”, the title of the featured article in the issue.  The subtext on the cover reads  “Marc Andreessen invented the browser. He was the first to the cloud. He’s the most influential VC in Silicon Valley. Here's what he sees on the horizon".

In the interview, Andreessen makes his admiration for technology plain.  When discussing his time at Netscape, he says “the idea we had then, which seems obvious today, was to lift the computing off of each user’s device and perform it in the network instead. It’s something I think is inherent in the technology—what some thinkers refer to as the “technological imperative.” It’s as if the technology wants it to happen.’  Later when predicting more computing in the “cloud”, he admits to bandwidth limitations, but says  “If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we’re not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that’s why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That’s why there are still Xbox games on discs. That’s why everything isn’t in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.”

The technology wants it?  Hopefully, it is not technology making decisions, but rather humans.  During my time in the Stanford STS program, I had the time to read and think about technology in more depth than I had before.  I found that periodically, especially in capitalistic countries such as the U.S., technology is given such a free rein that it overshoots, and fortunately, there has always been a backlash to re-direct it back to where it serves us, rather than inconveniencing us and wasting resources.  Sometimes a long time is required. Nuclear “weapons” may have once served a purpose (speeding the end of World War II, but even that is debated).  But slowly people are realizing that the words “nuclear weapon” are an oxy-moron, because any country actually using them will be shunned by the rest of the world, so to use them is to lose.  “Nuclear bargaining chip” is more accurate, and eventually they will disappear because they have no useful function, although perhaps not until most countries have them and realize they can’t use them.

We now realize the down sides of many once miraculous developments, such as the petroleum-fueled automobile, air conditioning, strip mining, and computer games. And it seems to me that the backlash toward the “information economy” and the products involved in it is well underway. Typically, the May 27^th New York Times had a cover article on a large and clever scam based on identity theft, and a critical column entitled “The Facebook Illlusion”.  There is increasing concern about issues of privacy and identity theft, I find the information on the web is becoming less useful as it increases in volume, and of course there is increased pesky advertising and data manipulation such as that described by Eli Pariser in his book “The Filter Bubble – What the Internet is Hiding From You (Penguin Press, 2011).  Perhaps it is time to agree that the digital revolution is here and miraculous, and focus more on the quality of the products involved (be they hard or soft).

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Thomas Friedman —Please add product quality to your concerns

 

I have been politely requested to write my posts on the same day of the week, so I will be posting on Mondays.  For a while I will be writing only one post per week, since I am also responding to local pressure and adding Facebook and Twitter to my life, so I will be more acceptable to contemporary students.  I must admit to a bit of  ambivalence, since I am not looking for more ways to spend time, but by next week I will be drowning in links—and in two or three weeks I plan to be adding posts to my blog  twice a week.

 A week ago, I heard Tom Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist,  talk about That Used to be Us, the book he recently wrote with Michael Mandelbaum.  If you have never heard Friedman talk, you have missed a treat, because he talks as well as he writes (three Pulitzer prizes, six best selling books).  But Mandelbaum is certainly no slouch, having been author or coauthor of twelve books, and Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of advanced International studies. The two of them are friends and neighbors, and although both study and write on international topics, this book is definitely about the U.S.  I read the book this weekend and loved it.

Friedman describes himself as a frustrated optimist about the U.S.  The subtitle of the book is “How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back”  It is a combination of criticism and cheer-leading.  He thinks we have what it takes to come back, but doesn’t see it happening at present.  Come back from where? 

He thinks we have been falling behind in four major areas.  The first is understanding of the nature of the present world.  As you may know, he is the author of the book “The World is Flat”, which was focused on globalization. He is frustrated because he doesn’t think we understand what globalization has done to us.  His second worry is that even though we were the innovators of what we will call the digital revolution, we don’t seem to understand what that is doing to us either.  In fact, he thinks the juxtaposition of globalizaton and the digital revolution is one of the largest displacements Homo Sapiens has faced.  His other two worries are U.S. debt, at the national, state, and individual level, and our inability to deal properly with the environment.

He feels that we need to get moving fast to bring ourselves up to speed on these four areas.  In order to do this, we need to focus on the five areas that he thinks has traditionally made the U.S. great.  These are education, infrastructure, immigration, research and development, and regulation. The book gives education particular attention, because as he says, if we want to be what we were, average is not good enough. In order to do this, he believes that we will have to have a functioning and less polarized government and population, and that sacrifices will have to be made at all levels.

One reason I like Friedman, is that I tend to agree with him, and he lays out the arguments so clearly and does not shirk bad news.  He fills his book with reliable statistics and does not suggest that there is an easy way for us to recover from our present malaise, but he does think we can, and unlike our political representatives, discusses the problems involved in depth.

Although he is critical of some of the directions that business and finance have taken, he is definitely aware of the major role they play in the quality of life in the U.S.  He is all in favor of entrepreneurship, increasing exports, streamlining regulations that hamper business, and creating a tax scheme and government support programs that aid business.  But, for some reason, he doesn’t mention product quality.  He talks about the need to make jobs and the need to keep productivity high, but does not comment on the obvious benefits of making the best products in the world.  His talk was wonderful except for that glaring omission.  Hopefully, he will read this blog post and write another book.

The book is in the list to the right.  I have been neglecting this list for a while, but I will soon review several excellent books that have to do with product quality.