Jonathan Rowe – Page 18

How Corporations Stymie Innovation

One of the pleasures of the Wall Street Journal is the way the reportorial accounts on the news pages often undercut the editorials. The market dogmatists of the latter apparently have the same regard for “reality-based” thinking that the White House does. Truth is what they want to be true — it’s their space after all — and the dynamics of innovation are a case in point.

One tenet of the market faith is that profit and property rights are crucial to innovation. Without them, no one will lift a finger and progress will grind to a halt. In some cases that might be so, up to a point. But the belief system flounders when one gets to social innovation – that is, the kind that occurs spontaneously in language, music, fashion, food, and even technology in many cultures. Then there’s the matter of figure skates.

How to Create a Real Ownership Society

Last year, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the “ownership society” the theme for his second term, he was doing more than throwing up a polemical smokescreen for his policies of providing corporate executives and Wall-Street investors with everything they could possibly want. He was also introducing a radical vision for the entire world.

Through trade agreements and diplomatic and military muscle, the president and his cohorts are intent on re-engineering the world for the convenience of corporations. They want to eliminate every centre of power, every vestige of tradition or social values, that stands in the way. With the exception of a few nods in the direction of family and religion, the market will be the engine driving every aspect of modern life—every moment of time and every inch of space. The impact of this goes far beyond American national politics. Through leading international institutions such as the U.N., World Bank and World Trade Organization, Bush’s ideas about an ownership society are setting an agenda that will transform the world into a playground for multinational corporations.

Can Economic Methadone Buy Time to Save the Economy?

This thing we call, with exquisite euphemism, “the economy”, has gotten itself into a real fix, and it goes much deeper than the interest rates and productivity numbers that the Greenspans obsess over. The machinery solved long ago the problem it was supposed to meet, which is human scarcity. When people lack today, it’s because of a rotten system of distribution, not because there’s not enough to go around.

The problem today is desire for the stuff produced, not the capacity to produce it. We are, as John McKnight of Northwestern University has observed, a society “in need of need.” The machinery can’t stop. For the individual corporation as for the system as a whole, there is — and can be — no concept of “enough”. There always must be more, and then more compounded onto that. Most of the depredations of the commons – the air and water, knowledge, the shared spaces we inhabit, the whole list – result from this unrelenting, built-in need of the system to keep itself going at an ever-accelerating pace.

Lawrence Summers: It’s the Economics, Stupid

Lawrence Summers, the Harvard president, has resigned, and the story quickly has become how the political correctness crowd hounded the poor man out. It was the “most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard’s diverse constituencies,” said Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law prof, in today’s Boston Globe. Dershowitz called Summers’ critics “arrogant”, a subject Mr. Dershowitz definitely knows something about, as does Mr. Summers.

There is no question that Summers stepped into Harvard’s p.c. muck. To that extent I almost feel for him, considering how he went out of his way to do so. But Summers has a p.c. problem of his own, or more precisely an e.c. problem – economic correctness. Summers is an economist, which means he thinks he knows how the world works. Like many in his field, he has not a small view of himself and of the belief system he professes. This was part of his undoing.

Willie Mays or AT&T

Before Elvis, before the Beatles, way before Michael Jordan, there was Willie Mays. Willie was new. He was cool. The face on his baseball card was coltish and fresh, not like the grim old guys of our fathers’ generation. His cap had a cocky peak; the brim curved down past his temples. We curved our little league caps like that. Late into the summer night, we practiced his amazing, back-to-the-plate catch in the 1954 World Series, as he raced into the depths of center field at the Polo Grounds.

That’s where Willie played, the Polo Grounds, in Harlem. The place actually started out as a field for polo. Newspapers called it the polo grounds, and over time the capitals crept in — the Polo Grounds. That’s how stadium names happened back then – from the ground up, as expressions of locality and place. Sometimes they came from family names of local owners, such as Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Sometimes they came from the place itself, such as Boston’s Fenway Park.

Does Exxon Have a Birthright?

America is not the first entity to become a replica of the parent it rebelled against. Individuals fall into this trap, so why not groups of them called nations? In its path from colony to empire, though, the U.S, has played out a version of the drama that is uniquely its own, and that includes the role of privilege, especially the hereditary kind.

America set out to abolish hereditary privilege, as it existed in that day at least. Aristocracy was the mark of the parent — England — it so much wanted to cast aside. But slowly, new forms of aristocracy have crept back. For one thing there’s the class divide that the current Administration has done so much to widen. Its push to abolish the estate tax in particular would bring about exactly the conditions that Madison and Jefferson tried to prevent. Jefferson actually advocated a progressive land tax to counter large concentrations of wealth. “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and to live on,” he explained.

It’s All in a Name

The news that a town in Texas has changed its name to that of a corporation, in exchange for free TV, made me think about my elementary school, which was named for a local man who died in World War I. I’m not going to pretend that I sat at my desk each day and pondered his bravery, as opposed to, say, the little League Game that evening.

But I still remember the awe I felt when I looked up at the plaque in the main corridor. Somehow the message penetrated my unruly mind, that I was supposed to be brave and unselfish, and to serve my community and my country, the way young Albert Edgar Angier had done.

Aesop in the Lab

It says something about our times that the news reads increasingly like a fable – which is to say, folly so pure it becomes object lesson. The latest example comes from Ames, Iowa, where a biotech start-up by the name of Phytodyne recently bit the dust. The company was going to develop a way to speed up the genetic engineering of crops. Typically the process takes six to eight years; Phytodyne was going to cut that by two.

This would be the “holy grail of the $30 billion crop seed industry,” as the Des Moines Register put it. It could help “turn Iowa’s 23 million acres of cheap corn and soybeans – now used primarily for livestock feed – into a gold mine of food, fiber, fuel and pharmaceuticals, supporters say.” University administrators, the state’s governor, faculty at Iowa State University involved in the project, all were salivating. The state actually committed $5 million in financial aid.

Who Owns a Batting Average?

What is it about baseball statistics? The records of no other sport – of nothing period except maybe the stock market –have the same effect. Kids who can’t do long division can tell you Ted Williams’ batting average for every year in his career. Games based on baseball stats have become a teeming subculture. In the Fifties it was All Star Baseball, a board game with a circular card for each famous player. The cards were sectioned off according to that player’s statistics. You put one on a spinner, spun the metal arrow, and if it came to rest on the section marked “1”, it was a home run, and so on. Babe Ruth had a huge “1” section; Eddie Collins, the great second baseman, had a small one, but a large area for singles, which was “7” I think.

Then came a more sophisticated version that took pitching and fielding into account. My younger brother played an entire season one summer with his best friend. They kept batting and pitching records, the whole thing. Now’s there’s fantasy baseball, in which participants manage teams composed of players they choose from current major league rosters. The performance of the players tracks their daily performance in the ongoing season. Some 16 million people play in Fantasy Leagues. I’ve known writers who were avid fantasy ballers. Now it all could come to a crashing halt, thanks to the Major League Baseball monopoly.

Open Source Celebration

I’ve never been one for revelry, and I have a dislike of journalistic clichés to begin with. (Does anyone besides a journalist say “revelry”?) But I did go out on First Night in Boston once or twice, and if you’ll forgive me for saying so, it was neat. The strange part is, the whole thing is illegal. Not according to the laws of Boston; the mayor started it. Rather it is against the laws of economics, as conventionally propounded at least.

Those so-called laws say that what belongs to everyone belongs to no one, and therefore is sentenced to neglect and decay. No one will invest in that which they do not own. Hence the extension of “intellectual property” rights to practically any notion that passes through the pecuniarily disposed mind. Well, no one owns New Years Eve. Yet hotels, restaurants, places of entertainment – whole cities – are investing like crazy. Back in 1997, Rudolph Giuliani, then-mayor of New York City, proclaimed that New Year’s Eve brought an extra $57 million in economic benefits to the Times Square area alone.