In the 70 years that have passed since Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction," economists have struggled awkwardly with how to think about growth and innovation. Born of the low-growth agricultural economies of 18th Century Europe, the dismal science to this day remains focused on the question of how to most efficiently distribute scarce resources, not on how to create new ones -- this despite two centuries of rapid economic growth driven by disruptive technologies, from the steam engine to electricity to the Internet.

There are some important, if qualified, exceptions. Sixty years ago, Nobelist Robert Solow and colleagues calculated that more than 80 percent of long-term growth derives from technological change. But neither Solow nor most other economists offered much explanation beyond that. Technological change was, in the words of one of Solow's contemporaries, "manna from heaven."

Climate economics until recently was similarly oriented. Economists mostly treated global warming as a challenge of distributing scarce resources (e.g., the right to pollute), not of creating new ones (e.g., cheap zero carbon energy sources). Climate models treated technological innovation as a given, not as a dependent variable.

Continue reading "The Creative Destruction of Climate Economics" »

Last February, we published an article at Yale Environment 360, "Beyond Cap and Trade, A New Path to Clean Energy":

Putting a price and a binding cap on carbon is not the panacea that many thought it to be. The real road to cutting US emissions, two iconoclastic environmentalists argue, is for the government to help fund the development of cleaner alternatives that are better and cheaper than natural gas.

Innovative energy technologies are certainly essential if the world is to curb carbon emissions. But in response to a recent e360 article by the co-founders of the Breakthrough Institute, an economist argues we must also cap emissions or put a price on carbon in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Continue reading "The Yale Environment 360 Debate Continued" »

In January, the Breakthrough Institute published its report, "Planes, Trains, and Car Bombs," arguing that despite warnings from politicians and terrorism experts that terrorists will pursue "exotic weapons and targets," al Qaeda continues "to carry out the same sorts of attacks they executed in the decades before 9/11." In the past decade, hirabis have not used biological or chemical weapons, nor have they targeted dams, our food supply, or the Internet. Instead, "al Qaeda directed, financed, or inspired attacks have targeted planes, trains, buses, government and symbolic buildings, and western hotels with bombs (and sometimes assault weapons)."

Now, in a Breakthrough debate, terrorism experts John Mueller, Brian Fishman, and Tom Parker weigh in over the assessment of the terrorist threat, the importance of language when discussing terrorism, and whether we're simply playing into terrorists' hands.

The Report:
"Planes, Trains, and Car Bombs" by the Breakthrough Institute

The Responses:

"Terrorism is Not an Apocalyptic Threat" by John Mueller
"For Counterterrorism Words Matter" by Brian Fishman
"Terrorism as Performance Art" by Tom Parker

By Breakthrough Journal Staff

In "Evolve," Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus argued that only by embracing modernization and technological innovation can we overcome this century's formidable environmental problems. Humans have long been co-creators of their environment, and what we call "saving the Earth" will require creating and re-creating it again and again for as long as humans inhabit it.

In a new Breakthrough Debate, two scholars lend criticism to this new "modernization theology."

Continue reading "Evolve: A Breakthrough Debate" »

In their Breakthrough Journal essay, "Conservation in the Anthropocene," Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalasz showed that conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning the battle to create parks and game preserves. While the number of protected areas has risen, species in wild places have fallen. Conservationists must shed their 19th Century vision of pristine nature, the authors wrote, and seek a new vision, one of "a planet in which nature exists amidst a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."

In a new Breakthrough debate, a host of passionate 21st Century conservationists, including Kierán Suckling, Paul Robbins, Ray Hilborn, Lisa Hayward, and Barbara Martinez, face off with the authors over the resilience of nature, corporate partners, and the state of conservation today.

Continue reading "Conservation in the Anthropocene: A Breakthrough Debate" »

By Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus

As an archetype, Frankenstein is buried so deep within our psyches that simply attaching the first half of its name to any other word is enough to invoke a vivid image. Frankenfoods. Frankenfish. What we see in our heads are terrible mutants, hybrids of machine and man run amok -- a cautionary tale against technological hubris.

But according to Bruno Latour, France's most influential living intellectual since the death of Jacques Derrida in 2004, we have Frankenstein all wrong. The man -- Dr. Frankenstein -- was not the monster. And Dr. Frankenstein's sin was not his hubris to create life but rather his fright that led him to abandon rather than care for his creation.

Continue reading "The Monsters of Bruno Latour" »

Last fall, Reagan scholar Steve Hayward ignited a national debate with his article in these pages, "Modernizing Conservatism." Breakthrough Journal hosted responses but the argument eventually spilled over into the blogosphere:

Continue reading "'Modernizing Conservatism' debate continues" »

By the Breakthrough Journal Staff

"By its own measures, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline. We continue to lose forests in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There are so few wild tigers and apes that they will be lost forever if current trends continue. Simply put, we are losing many more special places and species than we're saving."

So begins a searing indictment by the unlikeliest of sources: Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest conservation organization.

Continue reading "Conservation on a 'Spoiled' Earth" »

By Michael Burnam-Fink

Cross-posted from We Alone on Earth.

Andrew Sullivan has been blowing up the internet with an article about how Obama has outsmarted his critics on the left and on the right, by playing a long game that has allowed him to achieve meaningful policy advances without grandstanding or drama. Yet while Obama has achieved policy successes, he has failed to establish the government as a credible force for good. Andrew Sullivan misses the cultural forest for the policy trees. I didn't want Obama to be FDR; I just wanted him to reverse the worst parts of the Reagan revolution. Instead, at this rate, Obama is going to wind up looking more like Richard Nixon than Ronald Reagan.

Continue reading "Why Andrew Sullivan is Wrong About Obama" »

by Breakthrough Journal Staff

Efforts to reach a sweeping, 10 year budget deal collapsed recently after Tea Party Republicans forced Party leadership to oppose any compromise that included tax cuts -- even after President Obama had put treasured Democratic entitlements like Social Security on the chopping block.

Anti-tax activists dress up their opposition to tax hikes as a sign of fiscal responsibility. But in a new essay, the sociologist Fred Block argues that the Tea Party is simply the most extreme manifestation of a hedonistic consumer culture.

In "Daniel Bell's Prophecy", Block writes about his legendary former professor who in a 1976 book predicted the tax revolt, one driven by declining social solidarity and the public's increasing unwillingness to pay for productive public goods.

"The rise of a consumer culture from the 1920s to the 1960s," Block notes, "had effectively undermined the historic Protestant sanctification of work and replaced it with a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. Because pleasure is defined in individualistic terms, the pursuit of it results in an erosion of the moral bonds that have historically held society together."

In condemning the Republican opposition to a grand compromise, David Brooks in the New York Times writes, "According to the Gallup Organization, only 20 percent of Americans believe the budget deal should consist of spending cuts only... Yet the G.O.P. is now oriented around this 20 percent. It is willing to alienate 80 percent of voters and commit political suicide because of its faith in the power of tax policy."

While it is comforting to think that the Tea Party is a minority phenomenon that will be overcome once the silent majority speaks out, its roots in the larger culture reflect a much broader contradiction in our political culture, one that lies at the heart of today's fiscal crisis. Americans increasingly demand an ever-growing array of new public services and entitlements even as they have become less willing to pay for them. Forty years ago, Bell called for a new public philosophy capable of restoring America's commitment to collective public action critical to ensuring our national prosperity and greatness. Never has that need been clearer than today.

Read the full article here.

By Breakthrough Journal Staff

Twenty years of political instability has had myriad consequences for American life -- alas, greater humility among partisans has not been one of them. In 1995, Newt Gingrich predicted his Republican Revolution would last 30 to 40 years. One year later it was dead. In 2004, Karl Rove envisioned a "permanent Republican majority." Two years later, voters gave Congress back to Democrats. In 2008, Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira claimed Obama's election "not only solidified partisan shifts to the Democratic Party, it also marked a significant transformation in the ideological and electoral landscape of America." In 2010, the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party swept into power.

These wild swings in partisan political fortune are, we argue in "Modernizing Liberalism," signs of ideological exhaustion on both Left and Right. Liberals offer warmed-over New Deal Keynesianism as the tonic to our present economic malaise, suggesting that the economic policies that saved us during the Great Depression can once again put America's economic house in order. Conservatives, meanwhile, fantasize about undoing the New Deal and our modern regulatory state, imagining that we might return to an earlier era of laissez-faire capitalism that never actually existed.

Faced with the prospect of stagnant growth in an increasingly competitive global economy, America's polarized political class offers the nation few credible solutions. Indeed, both parties propose, albeit through diametrically opposed remedies, to stimulate domestic consumption at a time when the economic challenge that America faces is one of production. Conservatives offer knee-jerk opposition to new government spending of all kinds while maintaining a religious faith in the efficiency of the market -- even in the face of a financial crisis that originated with the deregulation of the financial sector and accelerated the collapse of much of America's productive economy. Liberals attempt to redistribute a shrinking economic pie down the income distribution, stimulate consumer demand with government spending, and replace unionized manufacturing jobs, once the means to economic mobility for America's working class, with unionized public sector jobs.

Neither old school redistributive liberalism nor new school neoliberalism are up to the task of dealing with economic stagnation and rising inequality caused by intensifying global competition and the shift to a knowledge economy. The key to greater economic opportunity and social mobility for the poor is a faster rate of economic growth, not wealth redistribution, however meritorious higher tax increases on the rich may be for future fiscal health. Meanwhile, neoliberalism, the dominant successor to redistributive liberalism, has cheered the financialization of the American economy and has had little to say about either the loss of 5.5 manufacturing jobs over the last decade, or the imperative to invest in new public goods, such as innovation.

Liberalism must evolve in order to become powerful in a country faced with profoundly different challenges than those of America's mid-century economic hegemony. Where today Americans are offered the choice between the privatization of entitlements or their maintenance, a new liberalism would limit entitlement programs to the provision of services that are demonstrably public goods. Where Americans are offered the choice between stimulating the present day casino economy or redistributing it, a new liberalism would offer a credible strategy to grow the productive sectors of the American economy. And where Americans are currently offered a choice between unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism or neoliberal market-making, a new liberalism would offer credible, public institutions that can provide public goods directly and efficiently.

Modernizing liberalism and conservatism won't bring an end to partisan or ideological conflict, nor should it. What it might do instead is create new kinds of conflict and cooperation that, over time, result in durable political coalitions capable of addressing the challenges virtually all Americans agree we must confront.

Read the full article here.

By Breakthrough Journal Staff

Monday's dismal manufacturing report and Tuesday's deal to slash spending have spooked the markets, which fear lower growth. While Obama and the Democrats say they will now focus on increasing jobs, the question is what can actually be done to grow the economy?

For Vaclav Smil, the famously pessimistic polymath, the answer is clear: the United States must manufacture its way out of decline.

Smil, virtually unknown in the United States, is no armchair pundit. The author of 32 books on risks, catastrophes and much else, Smil is a legend to energy wonks like Bill Gates and was the first non-American to win an AAAS Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

In a sharply argued piece on "The Manufacturing of Decline" Smil argues:

"The most practical and proven way to reduce America's huge trade imbalance is to export more manufactured goods in well-established sectors. Consider that from 2000 to 2008, America's exports of medicinal and pharmaceutical products expanded nearly threefold, industrial chemicals grew 2.4-fold, primary plastics 2.2-fold, and sales of power-generating machinery equipment rose by 70 percent. These accomplishments point the way: we cannot boost manufacturing by trying to repatriate millions of lost apparel, furniture, or electronics jobs. These losses cannot be reversed rapidly and most of those jobs would not come back even if Chinese exports suddenly ceased, as other countries would fill that vacuum. Rather, the solution is to expand those manufacturing sectors that are already outstanding exporters."

Smil attacks the optimism of those who wish for the service economy and dot coms to save America, noting "Facebook is valued by Goldman Sachs at $50 billion, nearly as much as Boeing, but Boeing employs some 160,000 people, whereas Facebook only employs 2,000."

Manufacturing is critical because it produces "economic benefits that finance and service sectors do not. The higher outputs from manufacturing create important backward-forward linkages that include many traditional jobs (from accounting to job training) as well as entirely new labor opportunities (in e-sales, global representation). As a result, sales of every dollar of manufactured products support $1.40 of additional activity, while the retail sector generates less than 60 cents for every dollar of final sales. In terms of job creation there is no comparison."

It's a self-destructive myth to believe the United States can't compete with China, whose "comparative advantages were created through government policies, not granted by nature." Smil, who is a professor at the University of Manitoba, adds, "There is no reason the United States could not reverse the fortunes of its manufacturing sector as it did in the 1980s with semiconductors and as Germany did more recently with its high-end consumer and industrial products."

What specifically should be done? Read the full article by Smil and find out.

By Breakthrough Journal Staff

Anti-government conservatism is ascendent. The Tea Party is the most significant social movement since the anti-war movement of the late sixties. Republicans are poised to take back the Senate in 2012 and may succeed in taking back the White House.

But, warns Steve Hayward, conservatives have reason to worry. The 50-year libertarian project to shrink the welfare state is a manifest failure. Government is bigger than ever. Tax cuts didn't "starve the beast" -- for decades, the evidence shows, they grew it.

Having failed to persuade voters to support entitlement reforms, Republicans have instead taken a fire ax to non-military discretionary spending, a fraction of entitlement spending. And while inequality may not be a libertarian concern, writes Hayward, a frequent contributor to the National Review and Weekly Standard, stagnating economic opportunity and mobility are.

What is a serious conservative to do? Recognize that there are underlying ideological barriers between Left and Right. But also know that American political culture will not allow one side to vanquish the other. That means the entitlement state is here to stay. Conservatives need to repudiate starve-the-beastism and seek pro-family tax policies to improve social cohesion. They must get right on environmental issues by pursuing conservative, non-coercive policies. And they must understand that some things, such as infrastructure and innovation, truly are public goods.

Conservatives who acknowledge that they cannot dismantle the welfare state must be met by liberals who acknowledge they cannot endlessly expand it. "Before the two camps can agree to an agenda truly in the national interest," Hayward writes in "Modernizing Conservatism", "liberals and conservatives must first reform themselves."

Read the full article here.

By Breakthrough Journal Staff

Over the last 20 years, many on both sides of the Atlantic came to believe that the nation-state was fading in importance. National political identities and allegiances were gradually being replaced by global ones. Economic globalization was being matched by global political integration. Europe's political and economic business would increasingly be conducted in Brussels, not Paris or Bonn. New global challenges, like climate change, would be dealt with by the United Nations.

"Cosmopolitan moments" like the euro crisis and global warming may yet trigger new transnational responses that remake the world in line with the cosmopolitan ideal. But with the Eurozone on the verge of collapse, the forces of nationalism once again on the march across Europe, and the failed United Nations climate process once more on display in Durban, many of those assumptions are ripe for reconsideration. Publics around the world look to their national governments to protect their interests. Nations appear unwilling to sacrifice their self-interest for the greater good.

In "Against Cosmopolitanism," Michael Lind, the founder of New America Foundation and columnist for Salon, offers a bracing counterfactual to the cosmopolitan view of history. He opens his piece reflecting on the cosmopolitan mood in pop culture.

All science fiction agrees. History is leading to the unification of earth. The united world may be governed by benign world federalism or by a dystopian global tyranny. But the modern literature of prophecy is clear: the age of competing nation-states is coming to an end. There are no visions of the future in popular culture in which advanced technology is combined with the continued sovereignty and competition of nation-states like China, India, and the United States or blocs like the European Union. The only near-equivalent is George Orwell's nightmare vision, in 1984, of endless rivalry among the three totalitarian blocs of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

Read the full article here.

By Breakthrough Journal staff

Over the last several decades, a scholarly consensus has taken hold that humans are the ecologically dominant force on Earth. We are no longer living in the Holocene, the period of environmental stability following the last Ice Age. We have so dramatically altered landscapes, the oceans, and the climate that the planet has entered the age of humans, the Anthropocene.

While some insist that we've exceeded natural boundaries, and that we must return to the environmental conditions of the Holocene as quickly as possible, the geographer Erle Ellis reviews the evidence for Breakthrough Journal and concludes that "the history of human civilization might be characterized as a history of transgressing natural limits and thriving."

The new age carries new risks, Ellis says, but so far agriculture has proven highly resilient to population growth, soil exhaustion, and climate change. Agriculture, Ellis notes, "already thrives across climatic extremes whose variance goes far beyond anything likely to result from human-caused climate change."

The main constraints on human populations are not environmental, Ellis concludes. Agricultural productivity around the world rises as population density increases. "Populations work harder and employ more productive technologies to increase the productivity of land only after it becomes a limiting resource," Ellis notes. And in most places, yield-increasing technologies were introduced long before they were needed to overcome natural limits.

What's ultimately at stake, Ellis argues, is not human civilization, but the ecological heritage of the Holocene. The good news is that urbanization could "drive ever increasing productivity per unit area of land, while at the same time allowing less productive lands to recover."

We should neither turn a blind eye to our ecological impacts nor exaggerate them, says Ellis. Rather, we must embrace our role as planetary stewards and start seeing the Anthropocene as "the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity."

Read the full article here.

By Breakthrough Journal Staff

The early 1980s were a period of crisis and change for the environmental movement. President Ronald Reagan had swept to power by campaigning against "environmental extremists" who he said favored "rabbits' holes" and "birds' nests" over jobs and economic growth. In office, Reagan filled his cabinet with anti-environmentalists and subjected environmental regulations to cost-benefit tests.

Greens were challenged intellectually as well as politically. In 1981, a 48 year-old Indian economist named Amartya Sen published a ground-breaking book showing that famines occur not because of failures of production but failures of distribution due to things like poverty, war, and political oppression. Sen's work, for which he eventually won the Nobel Prize, combined with the fact that per capita food consumption rose through the 1970s, discredited the Malthusianism that had been promoted by prominent ecologists such as Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich.

A new scientific case for environmental action was needed, and a new discipline -- ecological economics -- emerged to fill the role. Over the next 30 years, the concepts of ecological collapse, tipping points, and putting a price on nature would fleck the discourse of global political elites in the halls of McKinsey, Davos, and the U.N. Popular figures such as Thomas Friedman, Al Gore, Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, and Bill McKibben would draw on concepts developed by the ecological economists Herman Daly and Robert Costanza to claim that economic growth undermines the planet's capacity to support human civilization.

In a sweeping new history of the era written for the Breakthrough Journal, the esteemed environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff writes:

Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems. The concern was no longer centered on running out of food, minerals, or energy. Instead, ecological economists drew attention to what they identified as ecological thresholds. The problem lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse.

But outside the limelight, working ecologists were rejecting the idea of nature as closed, rule-bound "systems" existing in varying states of equilibria. "There is no dynamic order, force, or principle of self-organization that makes every hodgepodge a system," writes Sagoff. Species come and go, and the "systems," "progressions," and "equilibria" are mental constructs. Empirically-oriented ecologists returned to the work of scientists like Henry Gleason who in 1917 described "each association of plants and animals as unique, ephemeral, spontaneous, idiosyncratic, extemporaneous, and a law unto itself."

The radical ambitions of ecological economists to subject the economy to the laws of nature diminished greatly. Many joined the prosaic efforts of neoclassical economists to price ecosystem services; Costanza put the total value of the earth's ecosystems at $33 trillion.

"The Rise and Fall of Ecological Economics" is a cautionary tale. "If environmental decisions are fundamentally framed as questions of economic welfare," Sagoff concludes, "public officials and the public itself will opt nearly every time for whatever policy promises more economic growth, more production, and more jobs." In their obsession to model and monetize nature, ecologists and environmentalists lost their way. Says Sagoff, a former Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment:

The scientistic and self-referential controversies in which ecological economists engage drain away the moral power that once sustained environmentalism. This moral power may return if environmentalists employ science not to prescribe goals to society but to help society to achieve goals it already has.

Read the full article here.

Michael Lind, of the New America Foundation, says it's time for environmentalists to embrace the fact that we currently live in the Anthropocene, the age of humans, and to begin contending with the implications of that reality. He writes, in a review for Salon, that Breakthrough Journal's new e-book, Love Your Monsters, is an example of some of the "best thinking about the implications of the Anthropocene idea that I have seen."

Lind reviews the e-book and concludes:

Consciously or not, they echo the observation of one of the founders of American environmentalism, Aldo Leopold, in 1932: "Game can be restored by creative uses of the same tools which have heretofore destroyed it -- axe, cow, plow, fire, and gun."

While the term "Anthropocene" would have been new to him, the concept would have been familiar to Leopold. In his classic "Sand County Almanac" (1948) he wrote:

In all of these cleavages, we see repeated the same basic paradoxes: man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharpener of his sword versus science the search-light on his universe; land the slave and servant versus land the collective organism. [The poet E.A. ] Robinson's injunction to Tristram may well be applied, at this juncture, to Homo sapiens as species in geological time:
Whether you will or not
You are a King, Tristram, for you are one
Of the time-tested few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was.
Mark what you leave.

Lind wrote "Against Cosmopolitanism" in Issue 1 of the Breakthrough Journal.

Photo Credit: USFS Region 5

As a conservative, Andrew Sullivan says his perspective on inequality has typically been one of indifference. But now, he explains, inequality in the United States may have reached, and even surpassed, the point at which it is destabilizing to society. Here is Sullivan's "Ask Me Anything" clip on how his view on inequality has shifted leftward, practically speaking, in light of the current economic situation.

Supposedly, the seven billionth human was born yesterday. It's the sort of milestone that's abstract and difficult to be exact about, but somewhat like a birthday, it just feels important. So in honor of this astounding milestone, here's a collection of pieces explaining what seven billion humans (or more) might actually mean:

The Washington Post ran a thought-provoking collection of stories, raising all kinds of questions about Earth's growing population, from the abstract, like what would eight billion humans be like, to the very practical, like how do census takers count all of us? You can access all of the stories here.

The Atlantic Cities site told the story with graphs from the UN. The most notable one (below) depicts urban growth between 1950 and 2010. If you were wondering where seven billion people will live, the answer will, in large part, be cities.

And finally, the BBC has a calculator that gives you an idea of just how many people seven billion actually is in relation to the arc of human history, and a dizzying sense of how many people have ever walked our humble planet (I was the 79,943,237,493rd (ish) person born in the history of Earth).

Now that we did it, "next stop eight billion!"

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson suggests another way to restructure college education so that humanities majors have the technical skills they need to be competitive in today's market:

"My proposal would be that the selective universities need to offer a set of technical minors, aimed at liberal arts, humanities, and social science majors...:

• Technical, but at a level that looks to the math and science skills of the high school graduate that majors in English at that university;
• available in the fields of SMET, economics, and accounting, perhaps a couple of other areas;
• pass-fail, so as to deal with the rationality of avoiding anything a student doesn't already know he or she is good at;
• quite possibly taught by people who do not teach in the actual prestige-driven departments, since this will be at best an annoyance and distraction to those departments' quite different incentives...

There's something weird about inducing a nearly complete disconnect between the technical students and the humanities students, when they are all pretty smart. But what the humanities and liberal arts students need is a Yale history education -- and a state polytechnic education in one or another technical field. It is not the case that there is no value in a mid-tier technical education; we have whole ranges of schools that teach at those ranges -- the problem is, those departments are not accessible to students at Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Duke, Rice, etc. We are absolutely not socially well-served by brilliant students who have carefully, rationally, and prudently not studied anything other than history, English, politics and government, international relations, etc., for fear of getting less than an A-. They are brilliant and will probably do well in law or business school -- and we would be better off if they had some undergraduate training that told them in a real way about petroleum geology or computer programming languages."

Photo Credit: Billy Hathorn

In 2002, it was easy to imagine that America's bright future could be realized in the minds of the so-called creative class, a term Richard Florida popularized to denote a class of people who, "add economic value through their creativity." There was plenty of reason to be optimistic that a new class of working creatives could harness the possibilities of computing technology to drive an increasingly postindustrial American economy.

But then the 2008 financial crisis struck. Since then, the long, torturous unemployment spiral that is its legacy has many, including hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protestors (and now, Occupy Writers!), questioning whether the creative class ever had as much economic firepower as Florida and others expected.

Scott Timberg is one such skeptic of the creative class, arguing that computing technology was supposed to help create more jobs in the swelling ranks of the creative class, but instead it supplanted many jobs and wreaked havoc on the very industries that should be at the forefront of the creative revolution.

Timberg writes:

But for those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level -- the working- or middle-classes within the creative class -- things are less cheery. Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure -- they're among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset. The creative class is melting, and the story is largely untold... [E]ducation, talent and experience -- criteria that help define Florida's creative class, making these supposedly valued workers the equivalent of testosterone injections for cities -- does not guarantee that a "knowledge worker" can make a real living these days.

Continue reading "Thoughts on the Future of the Creative Class" »

I made a joke to my friend the other day that the lesson to take away from articles like this recent Economix blog ("The Rising Value of a Science Degree") and Noreen Malone's piece in New York mag is that no one should be allowed to be an English major anymore. It was a joke, so obviously this proposition is preposterous on a whole variety of levels. But apparently the English major gods heard me because yesterday I saw an article in the Cornell Daily Sun (my alma mater) describing a recent info session focused on what to do with an English degree after college.

Unfortunately for many English majors, professors broke the news that there isn't even a guaranteed path to academia anymore, so their prospects are even more devastatingly grim. But one professor recommended that students double major -- as much to gain a competitive edge as to ensure an escape route. The Economix post suggests a double major for exactly the opposite reason -- science majors could use a second major to give them a little more interpersonal savvy.

Continue reading "Rethinking College Majors" »

Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Institute Blog.

By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

If Occupy Wall Street protesters have struggled to articulate their demands beyond taxing the rich, part of their challenge is the changed nature of the economy. In a new article for The Breakthrough Journal, NYU sociologist Dalton Conley notes that while the 1929 stock market crash reduced inequality by wiping out fortunes, the 2008 crash provoked measures that sustained it. "But greater equality after the crash came at a very high price: the Great Depression. So while the response to the 2008 crisis sustained the top-heavy structure of the American economy, it also averted the free fall that threw tens of millions of Americans into unemployment and breadlines throughout the 1930s."

Moreover, even as the gap between the "99%" and the richest one percent has grown, "the interests of workers are increasingly yoked to those of their bosses," Conley notes. "Half of Americans today have direct or indirect investments in the stock market, largely thanks to the shift to defined contribution pension plans and the ease of Internet investing... So if the rest of us want to save our 401ks, we have to save the status quo for the robber barons of Wall Street in the process."

Couldn't the problem have been solved by nationalizing the banks and redistributing wealth? Such a strategy "might have distributed the costs and benefits of the bailouts more fairly," writes Conley, and "higher income taxes on the rich, along with more strongly redistributive social programs might succeed in mitigating some degree of inequality. But there are also powerful socioeconomic forces driving inequality." Conley points to growing global demand for elite knowledge workers (such as by the financial sector) and the widening skills gap.

Continue reading "Occupy Wall Street and the New Inequality" »

Some interesting insight into the effects of Yelp on restaurants from Brad Plumer at WonkBlog:

However, looking more broadly, chain restaurants as a whole seem to have declined in market share as Yelp has grown in prominence. "This suggests," [Michael] Luca writes, "that online consumer reviews substitute for more traditional forms of reputation." In 2007, about 50 percent of all restaurant spending, some $125 billion per year, went to chain restaurants. Chains have always benefited from uniformity: No matter where you go, you always know what you'll get at an Applebee's or a McDonald's. Independent restaurants, by contrast, are more of a gamble. But as online review sites like Yelp expand, that's no longer the case.

Concerns that the US economy can no longer innovate seem to be trickling into the cultural realm. According to Grant McCracken at the Harvard Business Review, some music critics are worried that "innovation in popular music is in decline," and that, "If this is true, a big cultural change is upon us -- the end of popular music as the great lab bench for our culture, as the defining innovator of our time."

But McCracken recognizes the nostalgia that underlies such fears, and puts forth five ways in which youth culture and pop music are actually changing the boundaries of what those cultural concepts mean today:

1. Contemporary musical forms like mashups are not a "barren genre." They are merely a new grammar, invented by cultural innovators to express a new culture.

2. Originality is not so much in decline as being revalued.

3. Young consumers are interested in music produced by previous generations, but they are using this music for their own purposes.

4. The new forms of music are expressive of new forms of self and group.

5. If music matters less to the way young consumers define themselves it's because they have found other, more useful media to do the job. Music doesn't have to be the innovative media it was for Reynolds' and other generations. That it worked especially well for earlier generations is due to historical chance and happenstance. Music matters to Reynolds for the same reason books matter to Boomer academics: it just happens to be the form that ideas assumed in the world they grew up in.

Continue reading "The Future of Pop Music and Youth Culture" »

This video takes the notion of signal "bars" to a whole new, totally breathtaking level. Using long-exposure photography and an incredible 4-meter light stick that measures WiFi, these filmmakers, in affiliation with the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, have "painted" a communication network we rely on everyday but can never see -- an "immaterial," as they call it.

You can find out more about the video and the concept of "immaterials" here and here. In the meantime, just watch in awe:

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

h/t: The Atlantic

This post has been cross-posted from my blog, Mneumozine, where I write about memory.

It's odd that Facebook makes us worried we can't forget enough, while Google makes us worried we'll forget too much. As I mentioned here, it's as if we don't even know what to be scared of when it comes to these new web technologies. We're just anxiety-ridden about the whole kit-and-kaboodle -- memory, forgetting, privacy, open source, transparency, anonymity. To me, at least, it feels like a "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" situation that's actually sort of calming, both in its familiarity and its uncertainty.

The latest buzz this week has come from the tech swarm around Facebook's new Timeline feature, which I honestly haven't even broached yet. But I hear tell that it's literally a chronological record of everything you've ever posted to Facebook. Ever. In the history of your experience on the site. For me, that's about six years.

Whoa.

Without dwelling on that horrifying number, I want to turn to a tumblr post from the Village Voice's music editor, Maura Johnston, who jotted down some interesting reactions to the Timeline feature and what it means in the context of privacy and memory:

I think there's something to be said about the idea of personality development over time that makes me quite uneasy about Facebook's exuberance over being able to chronicle one's whole life on the service. What does that do to the notion of memory, the fuzziness of which can have helpful functions at times? There are people who have been on Facebook since their teens--how is their development into adulthood affected by their past being so present? Shouldn't people have the option to escape their pasts, or at least aspects of their pasts, if they're hindering their personal development? Obviously there are degrees of the latter ideal--I'm not saying, hey, get away with murder and then expunge that fact from your record with a control-X--but I feel like the idea of having your whole life at your fingertips can be a bit of a trap, and can cause old patterns to persist for longer than they should.

My first reaction to this is to wonder how exactly development is (or is not) affected across the lifespan by what you might perhaps call a hyper-salient past?

Continue reading "What It Means to Forget on Facebook" »

Andrew Sullivan raises an important question: "Where does political philosophy come from?"

Will Wilkinson says, "politics," asserting that we construct our political philosphies around our politics to "justify our pick."

But a couple of months ago, the Dish's Zack Beauchamp said the exact opposite. He made the case for "philosophy," grounding his argument in the theory of motivated reasoning, by explaining that we are predisposed to pick our politics to align with our moral philosophies.

Is this a "chicken or the egg" sort of question? Is it different for everyone? What do you think come first?

When it comes to complicated policy issues, don't we all sometimes wish we could have Dr. Seuss explain it to us with perfect end rhyme and rollicking pictures?

Over at Marketplace, Gregory Warner applies Seuss's childish genius to a decidedly kid-unfriendly policy problem: "our big debate about job growth and our big debate about healthcare debt."

Enjoy:

Oh The Jobs (Debt?) You'll Create! from Marketplace on Vimeo.

H/T TNR

Although the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary seem to be racing to keep pace with a growing lexicon of catchy new Internet slang, Professor David Crystal says the internet hasn't altered the English language all that much. The advent of the web, particularly web 2.0 technologies, however, has led to an outpouring of new styles of English, impacting the way in which we use it to express ourselves.

Here's Crystal, for Macmillan:

The University of California (UC) plans to launch a classroom-caliber online education program this coming January. UC's newest contribution to e-academics is fueling important debate about the future of secondary education in the age of the Internet.

Financing issues aside, can this type of innovation expand secondary education access to poor and working class demographics who have been unable to cross what Dalton Conley describes as an "educational gap that is widening at precisely the moment when education has become most critical to their economic prospects"?

For the US military, at least, the answer may be yes. UC is pursuing action that will allow military personnel to "take online classes while on active duty, preparing for transfer to a four-year university."

For other disadvantaged or unconventional demographics, the accessibility of UC's online education experiment may take time to sort out. Still, top-tier online academic programs could have important implications for families overwhelmed by the current cost of a conventional college education as well as for low-income young people who might otherwise be locked out of the knowledge economy.

Mubarak set the example, Qaddafi learned the lesson, but apparently BART missed the memo that social-networking software may not be as effective as it appears at inspiring rebellion. Cutting connectivity to prevent an uprising, however, works like a charm, finds a new paper, "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest."

According to a New York Times report on the study:

"His [Navid Hassanpour] conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. "Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action," he writes.

To put it another way, all the Twitter posting, texting and Facebook wall-posting is great for organizing and spreading a message of protest, but it can also spread a message of caution, delay, confusion or, I don't have time for all this politics, did you see what Lady Gaga is wearing?

...

In an interview, described "the strange darkness" that takes place in a society deprived of media outlets. "We become more normal when we actually know what is going on -- we are more unpredictable when we don't -- on a mass scale that has interesting implications," he said."

Executive Editor Ted Nordhaus joined the Ben and Joel Podcast, led by Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, to discuss what's new at the Breakthrough Institute and the Breakthrough Journal. There's a lot of great stuff in there, but Ted took the time to explain that we need to answer two important questions as we re-think the role of the government in our modern lives:

1) What we want government to do?
2) How do we think government should do that?

Click here to be taken to the full podcast. The bit where Ted explains what we need to think about as we figure out the role that government should play in our lives runs from 2:50 - 7:05.

The acrimonious debate over raising the debt ceiling, the subsequent downgrade of American credit, and plummeting stocks worldwide, has finally brought home the harsh reality of just how broken Washington, DC is. To quote from Standard & Poor’s justification for the downgrade, “More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, US policymakers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures.” Instead of solutions, the continual crisis has led to an epidemic of posturing and "brinksmanship," the all-time lowest approval rating for Congress, and a global economy that tumbles on the words of a few self-appointed ‘experts’. This crisis of credibility has destroyed the ability of the American government to respond to any other challenge.

What does this latest loss of faith in government imply for the future of US policy-making and what it might it mean for the project of modernizing liberalism articulated by the Breakthrough Journal editors?

How can we restore a responsible and effective government capable of legislating under the pressure of immense domestic and global 21st century challenges?

Below multi-generational policy thinkers share their vision about where the US goes from here:

Mike Lind, New America Foundation: "When pirates capture a tanker, one does not blame the ship's design. The problem of conservative obstructionism in Congress is a political problem, not a structural defect of Congress or government as a whole. Conservatives have intimidated moderate Republicans into acquiescing in their strategy of using any and all chokepoints to advance their radical agenda. The solution, like the problem, is political. If moderates cannot marginalize the far right within the GOP, then the militant-controlled GOP must be marginalized by a more popular and successful Democratic party. Blaming "the system" or implying that all sides are to blame just diverts attention from politics to process."

Rob Atkinson, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation: It’s long been popular to blame Washington for the nation’s problems, but no more so than now.  It’s Washington’s intransigence and corruption that is to cause for the latest financial downgrade and debt ceiling brinksmanship, so goes today’s common wisdom.  If only elected leaders would 1) get a spine; 2) be term limited; 3) stop being so partisan; 4) be more partisan and stand up for their beliefs, or (fill in your favorite complaint here), then all would be well.  

Let me suggest that this has it fundamentally backwards.  As Alan Simpson once said shortly before he left the Senate, I know people are fed up with Washington, but let me tell you something, I am fed up with the American people.  Right on, Alan!  Try running in any Congressional primary, Democratic or Republican, have a key plank in your platform that for the good our nation we need to raise the gas tax and use the money to invest in infrastructure.  Odds are you will be voting in the general election for someone other than yourself.   We haven’t raised the gas tax since 1994 and it’s lost considerable purchasing power since then due to inflation.  And the result is that as a nation we massively under invest in surface transportation infrastructure (roads and transit).  But any effort to tell Americans to stop being so selfish and instead start worrying about the good of the nation and our children, is met with disdain or worse.  Try running in a Congressional primary and saying that for the good of the country we need to raise the retirement age to 70 (including for government workers) and index Social Security benefits to inflation, not wages.   Again, good luck with that election. 

In other words, over the last generation Americans have turned inward and selfish.   Today’s John Kennedy’s call to arms “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” is as quaint as a Ben Franklin proverb.   So before you once again blame Washington at your next cocktail party or barbeque, take a long look in the mirror and remember Pogo’s advice, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

Teryn Norris, Americans for Energy Leadership: If modern liberals want to salvage the United States from a decade or more of political dysfunction and economic malaise, they need to present a clear choice to the public in the years ahead: elect "leaders" who refuse to govern and would tear the country down, thus empowering China to dominate the 21st century, or choose a responsible vision and agenda to rebuild the nation and reclaim American greatness for decades to come.

Despite the current dysfunction, exceptionalism still runs deep within the American psyche, as it has since the founding and throughout Civil War and Great Depression.  As national pollster Stan Greenberg has said, "People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats."  

Earlier this year, a Gallup poll found that 52% of the public would name China as the world's "leading economic power," the highest percentage favoring another country in Gallup polling history.  In contrast, only 7% named Japan, and just 3% the European Union.  Meanwhile, the IMF recently projected that China's GDP will surpass the U.S. by 2016, measured by purchasing power parity -- a vastly over-optimistic prediction, but shocking nonetheless.

Those who are still committed to American leadership -- Democrats and moderate Republicans alike -- must recognize one clear reality that's emerged over the past two years: it is not enough to simply discuss the potential benefits of sensible economic policy. The public needs to understand the full stakes for the United States and the world if the Tea Party succeeds and we fail to pursue a proactive economic growth strategy. And what's at stake is nothing less than the American era and international order as we know it. 

According to MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, the debt ceiling is just a distraction. The real problem with the American economy is not that one number (the national debt) is getting close to another number (the GDP), but that the economy is losing it's innovative fire. But there are lots of policy changes that could translate the latest scientific breakthroughs into commercial products, bring smart people to the US and keep them here, and invest in the clean energy technology of the future. Sure beats hunkering down in a bunker with gold (or beer) and guns:  

"Consider this: increasing the country's average growth rate by one percentage point over the next 20 years would not only result in much higher incomes and more jobs for all Americans but would also obviate the need for drastic spending cuts today to reign in the government deficit. With a 2% increase per year, average incomes in the United States, and to a first approximation government tax revenues, would be 49% higher in 20 years than they are today; with a 3% increase per year, they would be 81% higher."