Tag: policy

Great gov IT raises GDP

There’s a new digital divide in this country, and instead of it being between the rich and the poor, it’s between the government and the people that it represents. The pace of technology increases exponentially, and with too much friction on how the government buys things, that gap will continue to exponentially widen.

This is a bad thing because people’s expectations of service directly correlate to the amount of technology available to them. Today, my parents are vacationing in Croatia, and just 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have expected to get any word from them until they return in a few weeks. Today, I get messages from them on a regular basis throughout their trip. My expectations have changed.

And with government it’s the same thing. 10 years ago, when I started on the Dean campaign, there were no meet ups, there were no video conferences, there were no SMS campaigns, there was no iPhone, twitter, myspace or Facebook. Friendster was just getting off the ground.

But today our expectations have changed. And government needs to shift in order to accommodate those expectations, at a cost that’s within the same order of magnitude that we pay.

So please pass this along, if you care about the effectiveness of the services your government delivers to you, or if you care about small, efficient government, this should be an issue for you.

A country will only be as competitive as their gov it Infrastructure. World class it would save 100s of billions a year and would likely show up in GDP growth too.

Dismantling fire departments

Fires have become much rarer, there are too many firefighters. Which is why you see them responding to medical emergencies. Like all organizations, they fight downsizing.

City records show that major fires are becoming vanishingly rare. In 1975, there were 417 of them. Last year, there were 40. That’s a decline of more than 90%. A city that was once a tinderbox of wooden houses has become a much less vulnerable place.

The number of professional firefighters in Boston has dropped only slightly, from around 1600 in the 1980s to just over 1400 today

2014-06-27: Can Fire Stations do health duties?

A new firehouse clinic in California shows how an abundant but under-used public resource—fire stations—can be made even more useful for a community.

We have too many firefighters now due to improved building codes, but like any organization, they resist being shrunk to the correct size. That’s why you often see 3 trucks being dispatched to save a kitten.

2022-10-06: Why do Fire Departments still exist?

According to the 2021 statistics of the FDNY, they attended 1213750 incidents. That’s a lot of fires. But when you take those incidents apart, it emerges that ‘Fire Incidents’ make up less than 25% of calls. Even then, the 290643 ‘Fire Incidents’ cover things from actual fires to malicious false calls, with structural fires being 10639 – the vast majority are more medical incidents. In much of America, the fire departments often take up the role that ambulance services would in Europe. 65% of ambulances in New York are run by the fire department, with the remainder from hospitals.

Europe

One of my favorite topics and in the end the reason why I left Europe.

One doesn’t have to have a US-centric view of privacy, competition policy, or free speech to notice the dissonance between European mores and the digital economy. One assumes Europeans want to enjoy the benefits of the Internet, but they also seem consumed with ensuring that nothing of the old order is changed—let alone destroyed—in the process. They are the continental incarnation of what Virginia Postrel calls stasis—they are unwilling to accept the tradeoffs that come with progress and instead hopelessly try to plan around all discomfort.

2013-04-10: Remember Quaero, the search engine just like real search engines, but with more european commission? Apparently someone forgot to shut the project down and they are proudly working on a human adventure
2013-04-11: Economies in Europe don’t have the flexibility to deal with the double challenge of globalization and automation, so they’ll shrink a lot.
2015-06-19: Why Europe can’t have nice things.

Americans tend to act in a more rational and less emotional way about the goods and services they consume, because it’s not tied up with their national and regional identities. In Europe, stability is prized. Europeans are conservative with a small c. They pretty much like things the way they are

2018-03-26: European protectionism

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is 2x as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30%. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and countries would raise EU GDP by at least 25%.

2018-07-20: European Commission really hates innovation.

The European Commission continues to be a bit too cavalier about denying companies — well, Google, mostly — the right to monetize the products they spend billions of dollars at significant risk to develop; this was my chief objection to last year’s Google Shopping case. I am concerned that the Commissions’ publicly released reasoning doesn’t seem to grasp exactly how Android has developed, the choices Google made, and why.

2021-03-04: Anemic GDP growth, or even shrinking

The average European is ~33% or more worse off than the average American, and it’s getting worse.


2021-03-05: More regulatory nonsense

What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition. If you want to ensure that Twitter wins in audio, or that Facebook wins everywhere else, then elevating privacy over everything else, ignoring both tradeoffs (like killing competition in social networks) and facts on the ground (like the reality that your contacts have long since ceased to be private), is an excellent way to accomplish exactly that. Look no further than ecommerce.
Shopify, 1 of the most exciting companies in tech and the seeming leader of The Anti-Amazon Alliance, effectively moving into Facebook’s garden, because the web is increasingly a barren wasteland for small businesses. The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively (Shop Pay performed magic in this regard), and its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in 1 place and convert them in another. The solution is to do user acquisition and user conversion all in 1 app — i.e. on Facebook — which is why Shopify is helping merchants move off the web and onto Facebook.

2022-12-14: A good summary why there’s no innovation in Europe

  • Talented people have a choice of careers. In Europe we steadfastly underpay technologists. Many people that really really want to get into engineering and programming continue to do so anyhow. A larger class however gets swayed by better paying jobs in financial engineering and other non-productive shenanigans. The response here to far higher US salaries for technical people is always that money is not the only factor. This is true. However, the OTHER factor of work is being appreciated and valued, and we also do not offer that! In Europe we outsource technology, as we don’t really consider it a core activity.
  • Not only do we not appreciate technologists, we also penalize founders. Banks, tax agencies and even family members distrust startups and will make life difficult for you.
  • For better or worse, here in Europe we are fond of business plans that somehow make sense. Blue sky “let’s launch this and I’m sure we’ll eventually find sufficient rent seeking or surveillance possibilities to one day make money” things don’t fly too well here.
    • Specifically, I’ve found that in the US it is quite acceptable to discuss plans that revolve around eventually screwing over your customers when they aren’t in a position to leave
    • In addition, European investors and entrepreneurs don’t tend to see their ventures as ’lottery tickets’ that might pay off. We like to see things costed with at least a theoretical path to profits
  • Related, it really is the case that (on average) US entrepreneurs are more ruthless and competitive than European ones. The flip side of this is that any nastiness hinders trust which makes it harder to build partnerships.

2023-07-17: Europeans are getting poorer.

The eurozone economy grew 6% over the past 15 years, compared with 82% for the US. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every US state except Idaho and Mississippi. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the US and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today.
Spending on high-end groceries has collapsed. Germans consumed 52 kg of meat per person in 2022, 8% less than the previous year and the lowest level since calculations began in 1989.

Changing your mind

this is great progress. just like the pope isn’t infallible, pretending that the president is creates entirely wrong incentives. it makes it very hard to back away from stupid ideas. i hope we evolve to a point where laws routinely come with sunset clauses and regular review to make sure they are not doing more harm than good.

how was it that Bill Clinton, the first President to champion gay rights, put his name on one of the most discriminatory anti-gay statutes in American history? The simple answer is that he got boxed in by his political opponents, and that his campaign positions on gay rights ran ahead of public opinion. But there was another important factor: a failure to imagine how quickly gay rights would evolve, and how difficult it would be to undo the damage that DOMA did.

Automated manufacturing

Manufacturing Will Not Save Us. It will end unemployment for robots though.

It’s not manufacturing that drives economic growth and creates new jobs, but innovation, creativity and talent. The big job generators for the past several decades and for the foreseeable future remain high-skill, high-pay knowledge jobs and low-pay, low-skill service jobs. We need to leverage and deepen the former, investing in the knowledge, technology and skill that drive innovation and economic growth.