Growthology

Wherefore Doctors?

Most readers probably saw this lead story in Monday's New York Times: "Doctor Shortage Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals."

If only there were an option of equal quality but lower cost!?!

Limits of Taxation (Glaeser edition)

Edward Glaeser says that mobile labor constrains the effectiveness of tax rates. Since successful development relies on attracting skilled workers, it seems that raising state and local taxes deter those very workers from establishing roots.

Typically, every five years, 43 percent of Americans change houses, 18 percent of Americans change counties, and 8.4 percent of Americans change states. Mobility radically constrains the ability of geographically small governments to redistribute.

Hmmm.  Maybe this is why Massachusetts has a flat tax, but it doesn't explain why Texas has no income tax at all.  Anyway, the post is very highly recommended (indeed, I will probably re-read Glaeser's post and follow the links again this year).

Keynes, Once Again More Prophetic Than Present Day Economists

A recent Business Week cover story asked, "What Good Are Economists, Anyway?" The online material included snapshots of the views of three macroeconomists, including Thomas Sargent:

In the 1970s, Sargent was one of the thinkers behind "rational expectations," which says that ordinary people can correctly anticipate the range and likelihood of possible future outcomes. Sargent now says that theory was an oversimplification. In real life, he explains, households and businesses are highly uncertain. Developments such as an unexpected government action or a major company going bust can cause people to drastically revise their beliefs about what might happen next. The good news: Beliefs may shift back again through unexpected positive events.

This rings a bell. Oh, that's right:

"Now a practical theory of the future based on these three principles has certain marked characteristics. In particular, being based on so flimsy a foundation, it is subject to sudden and violent changes. The practice of calmness and immobility, of certainty and security, suddenly breaks down. New fears and hopes will, without warning, take charge of human conduct. The forces of disillusion may suddenly impose a new conventional basis of valuation. All these pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-panelled Board Room and a nicely regulated market, are liable to collapse. At all times the vague panic fears and equally vague and unreasoned hopes are not really lulled, and lie but a little way below the surface."

--John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment," QJE, 1937.

Keynes wasn't a perfect economist, of course. In particular, and of interest to certain readers, Keynes had one foot firmly in the arts community, as a member of Bloomsbury and patron of the arts. It's a wonder, then, that he didn't give more weight to human creativity and entrepreneurship (aside from his brief discussion of animal spirits, not totally apposite) in his writings.

Alex Tabarrok's "Future of Growth"

Video of Alex Tabarrok's talk at TED. My favorite points:

• "How do you get more ideas?  More idea creators. ... Today less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the world's population are scientists and engineers."

• "We will see an Einstein in Africa in this century."

• "$200,000 ... this is a rather modest prediction."

The Tabarrok thesis is that global growth in per capita income is accelerating. This is a big, big deal ... the 0.1 percentage point increase in the growth rate every decade for the last 2 centuries has already destroyed most of human poverty, and Alex is showing how growth will finish the job in this century. By the way, the 0.1 per decade acceleration is my rule of thumb projection, so don't slam Alex if you think it is stupid, although I suspect he would agree with me. The data tell this story; it is not make-believe.

Analysis: Naturally, I loved Alex's talk and highly recommend it.  But I am always stunned at the kind of reaction that optimistic economists get, and I felt it again when I read many of the comments at the TED page.  For example, Jake Koethler writes, "The third world will never be developed to the extent that the rest of the world is. There aren't enough natural resources to sustain that level of development." I have been trained to impressed by lines on paper representing big abstract things like GDP per capita. But this is not natural. So Jake may be right, but I suspect he is falling for the instinctive zero sum fallacy. Division of labor disproves the limits to growth on one level, but Jake would probably say that labor is not the limiting factor here. Resources -- oil, gold, steel, agricultural capacity, water -- are the limiting factors.

I'm not sure I can disprove in this post the notion that limited stocks of any one thing limiting to overall prosperity, but it is clearly a powerful article of faith among many super smart people. Hopefully, we optimistic economists can make a convincing case that there is ultimately only one resource constraint: GDP per capita. A simple explanation: it is not the country with the most gold that dominates the world, rather it is the country that is the most productive. Every other thing's economic value derives from its balance of scarcity that ultimately rests on human demand. Because something is finite does not mean it can limit what is theoretically limitless, especially because all finite resource can arguably be reused. The execption is oil, but that's just one form of potential energy, and the sun is a lot bigger.

Those who believe in the resource constraint problem are logically arguing that too much growth causes slower growth. That reasoning is difficult to reconcile.

This may all seem trivial, but many beliefs about modern conflict hold fast to the principle of finite resource constraints. They see competing groups fighting for water, and deduce that water is a source of conflict. But poor people don't want water; it is just a proxy for what they really desire, which is prosperity.

Unlocking Jobs

One of the surprises in our recent surveys of blogger experts and the public (via Doug Schoen) is the importance of medical insurance as a job lock, the phrase used to describe how Americans become captured with iron (if not golden) handcuffs to their existing employers with untaxed benefits.  Health benefits are arguably the most important, since they are protections against catastrophic loss, and the fact is that self-employment cannot compete on a level playing field with those protections. Entrepreneurship, from this perspective, is much more risky than it would be normally. It's one thing to risk your income, and it is something altogether different to risk the health of your family.

Economist bloggers in our survey identify the loss of benefits as the #1 barrier to starting a new company in the minds of most Americans.  Similarly, they said that the #1 change to encourage more start-ups would be allowing people to "keep existing health benefits."  In Kauffman's major 2007 Roadmap paper that Bob Litan assembled and published with a dozen experts, decoupling health care from employers was positioned as one the top policy changes that would enhance entrepreneurship.

Here's a quick scan of the job lock literature:

• RAND (2007) by Fairlie, Kapur, and Gates, "Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship?"
• Heritage Foundation (2009) by Winfree, "Does employer-sponsored health insurance reduce job mobility?
• ILRR (2007) by Bansak and Rafael, "SCHIP and Job Mibility"
• This highly readable 2006 literature review by the blogger Healthcare Economist.

I am surely missing some other good papers and summaries (and I found the wiki page disappointing).  Any suggestions?

My quick analysis of the issue, which is not set in stone ...

1. The tax treatment of health and other benefits is harmful to economic efficiency.  All emplolyment benefits should be treated as income, which would be both progressive and pro-growth!

2. Job lock may be hard to identify empirically, but survey data show it to be a major concern. I suspect much early-stage entrepreneurship is hampered into a part-time activity due to job lock, which means current policy is bogging down growth and innovation.

The Triumphant Return of Harold Bradley

He's back, this time to elucidate the hidden connections between the beloved SNL duo Hans and Franz and the utter tautology of investment consulants and prudent man standards. (I also hear he will be writing the script for the sequel to The Departed based on this pseudo-protection racket.)

A Reversal of Historic Trends?

Brian over at Schumpeter's Century has an interesting post today on mobility and downturns.

Is Ireland a Cautionary Tale?

Paul Krugman is warning that America may go the way Ireland if its not careful, pointing to that country's current economic crisis as a symptom of excessive economic freedom. His essay is a clear case of revisionist history, and as my Irish grandmother would have said, "Shame on him."

First, the context. The Economist says Ireland is in "a deeper recession than any other euro area country. The economy probably shrank by 2.5% in 2008 and may contract by another 6.5% this year. Unemployment has jumped from 5% to 10.4%, a faster rise even than in America." Further, the government may have worsened the crisis with poor policy choices. Krugman, for those just tuning in, thinks that nationalizing banks is a much better course of action than bailing them out of toxic assets. That's what Ireland did when it faced a banking crisis last year, which arguably failed, and it's what the Obama administration is essentially doing now. 

Krugman may be right about nationalization; I share the same skepticism of bank bailouts and toxic asset purchases. That's not the issue. The problem with Paul Krugman is that he can't resist using a free-market straw man to make his point. Red Flag! Foul! Bad Journalism! Here's the offensive Krugmanian paragraph:

How did Ireland get into its current bind? By being just like us, only more so. Like its near-namesake Iceland, Ireland jumped with both feet into the brave new world of unsupervised global markets. Last year the Heritage Foundation declared Ireland the third freest economy in the world, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore.

Boil this down, and he is saying that economic freedom is the same as "unsupervised" laissez-faire markets, with the implicit judgment that this is dangerous. Krugman is preaching cartoon Keynesian economics, as if having state enforced contract law and property rights were somehow equal to no law. Not to mention, glibly asserting that free trade is bad and high taxes good.

Specifically, Krugman is taking aim at the Index of Economic Freedom, which most readers know that I directed in 2006-07 including a major refinement in its methodology with the 2007 edition (this chapter with Bill Beach from the 2008 version is online). And it's true, reforms in Ireland since the mid 1980s catapulted that nation from one of the least free to one of the most free places on Earth. This policy shift coincided with one of the starkest economic miracles ever.

The "Celtic Tiger" story is much different than development miracles in the Third World, say in Asia or Latin America. Those places were untouched by modernity in some sense. But Ireland was the opposite: a stagnant economy surrounded by modernity. Indeed, no country was closer to the birth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and yet it had still not received the diffusion of its benefits. None. So in a very powerful way, Ireland is the ultimate case study in the story of bad policy as a barrier to growth.

Let's examine the facts. First, consider Ireland's economy right now. Here is the full text of the "Economy Overview" from CIA's World Factbook page on Ireland (updated 9 April 2009):

Ireland is a small, modern, trade-dependent economy. GDP growth averaged 6% in 1995-2007, but economic activity dropped sharply in 2008 and Ireland entered into a recession for the first time in more than a decade with the onset of the world financial crisis and subsequent severe slowdown in the property and construction markets. Agriculture, once the most important sector, is now dwarfed by industry and services. Although the export sector, dominated by foreign multinationals, remains a key component of Ireland's economy, construction most recently fueled economic growth along with strong consumer spending and business investment. Property prices rose more rapidly in Ireland in the decade up to 2006 than in any other developed world economy. Per capita GDP also surged during Ireland's high-growth years, and in 2007 surpassed that of the United States. The Irish Government has implemented a series of national economic programs designed to curb price and wage inflation, invest in infrastructure, increase labor force skills, and promote foreign investment. In 2008 the COWEN government moved to guarantee all bank deposits, recapitalize the banking system, and establish partly-public venture capital funds in response to the country's economic downturn. Ireland joined in circulating the euro on 1 January 2002 along with 11 other EU nations.

Want to know the in-depth story of Ireland?  Ask the Irish. In 2006, I authorized the publication of a Heritage report written by Sean Dorgan, the Chief Executive of IDA Ireland since January 1999. Dorgan shows that the decades of nationalism, massive government social programs, and protectionism were simply abject failures. Only when Ireland slashed its corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent - one of the lowest in the world - did its economy boom. But before thinking about what worked, step back and consider what did not:

The role of the state also increased during the 1960s. Public expenditure grew from 32 percent of GNP in 1960 to 42 percent in 1973. Social services and education, in particular, expanded with the state. ...

Between 1980 and 1986, total government expenditure grew from 54 percent to 62 percent of GNP, and public debt increased from 87 percent to 120 percent of GNP while annual budget deficits exceeded 10 percent of GNP.

And then the party Fianna Fail won the 1987 general election and began "a pro­gram of severe cuts in expenditure." Reform after reform was emboldened by growth, which kept the critics on their heels, if not silenced outright.

The same story told by the Heritage/Wall Street Journal Index is also told by the World Bank's Doing Business Report. It's a story that shows with data that government spending to make economies grow is an empirical failure. The story of economic freedom explains how to fight global poverty. And it's pretty clear that Paul Krugman does not like that story. While the current market and government failures deserve scrutiny and correction, we have to be wary of ideologues like Krugman who will use the crisis to smear all pro-growth policies (and other ideologues who will smear all government solutions). The only way to do that is with the perspective of history.

Using purchasing-power-parity data from the latest IMF World Economic Outlook, Ireland had per capita GDP of $6613 in 1980.  That means the typical family of four had $2000 a month to survive on. By 1996, that number had tripled. In 2007, it peaked at $43,414.  All of Krugman's fury boils down to the fact that GDP per capita in Ireland fell in 2008 to $42,780. It may drop further, maybe below $40,000, but it is criminal to suggest that Ireland should return to its auld ways.

When Education Becomes an Economic Burden

In their new book and in their prior work, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have convincingly demonstrated the enormous boost the U.S. economy received in the last sixty years from increasing investments in education. For the last two decades, anxiety has risen that the United States has reached some sort of education plateau or decline and that economic growth will accordingly suffer.

A new McKinsey report, highlighted by Thomas Friedman the other day, appears to prove that this is indeed the case. Had the United States kept pace with our own prior achievements and more recent stars like Finland and South Korea, our GDP today would be $1 to $2 trillion larger. That might seem like a drop in the bucket in a $14 trillion economy, but how much has the Federal Reserve spent thus far on its various firefighting moves? Oh, right, $1.2 trillion. And bailouts? Um, $1 to $2 trillion. 

OK, so what: surely we can make all this up through faster growth? Well, right, about that, see economic growth has become increasingly dependent on education over the past three decades. That knowledge-based economy everyone's always talking about? It's for real, and it requires concomitant investments in not just knowledge creation, but the ability of people to codify and, most importantly, use that knowledge. I just happened to be reading Dominique Foray's fabulous Economics of Knowledge when I ran across this McKinsey report. The juxtaposition is like finding out when McDonald's breakfast ends: "total mind blow." 

I'm not usually disposed to let one report or one apparent trend scare me, but considering the nature of knowledge in the abstract, the history of American education and growth, and the sorry state we find many of our schools in today--well, it's a tad daunting.

I make no claims to be an education expert, and I know I keep coming back to this, but I simply can't help thinking about the "high school movement" with regard to these issues. Goldin and Katz are again the authorities here. The nature of knowledge, in general terms, hasn't really changed in the last century, but it's economic importance, the way we use it, and the way we propagate it, have changed radically. This should have clear implications for our educational system.

What those are, I'm not in a position to say, but it becomes more obvious every day that we need some serious institutional innovation in the realm of education, akin to the rise of secondary schools that arose with the industrial economy. Technology has a role to play here; alternative models like KIPP, too.

Any brilliant ideas out there?

To What End, Growth?

A great essay by Phil Auerswald and Zoltan Acs:

"Continued institutional innovations will be required to ensure that democratic societies with market-based economies are as resilient in the future as they are prosperous. . . . Unfortunately, political action to support entrepreneurship is stymied by a political system still living in the past. On the one side is a party committed to economic liberty, a party which has an historic affinity to entrepreneurs, but which today is analytically handicapped by its 19th-century interpretation of the nature of markets and market failure. On the other side is a party committed to economic rights, a party which has an historical appreciation for the benefits that can derive from enlightened government action, but which today is functionally handicapped by its 20th-century (Galbraithian) interpretation of American capitalism. The result is a debate in which both parties are well intentioned and both are programmatically wrong. This has produced a depressing stalemate in which neither side of the aisle produces the policy initiatives required for a renewal of sustainable prosperity."

Miss the Movie, Not this Review

Tyler Cowen's review of the documentary THE END OF POVERTY is fun, priceless, hopefully an important step forward in the coversation about global development in the public arena, and a piece that I suspect will be remembered for many years. Quoting heavily:

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not....

In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.

The history in this movie starts, not coincidentally one may assume, in 1492 with the arrival of Columbus in the New World. The phrase “natural economies” is used repeatedly to refer to the conduct of the since-despoiled noble savages, and we are told that the Europeans destroyed the natural economies of the countries they conquered. Never mentioned is the fact that these so-called natural economies were themselves based on prior conquest and oppression. ...

Most of all, the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation should be ashamed for having funded this movie. The Schalkenbach Foundation was set up in 1925 to promote the thinking of Henry George, best known as the author of Progress and Poverty and advocate of a tax on land. George was a flawed but brilliant and incisive thinker. He understood that wealth needs to be produced, and he also understood the strong case for free trade, most of all to protect the interests of labor. His 1886 book Protection or Free Trade remains perhaps the best-argued tract on free trade to this day; in that book George refutes exactly the arguments put forward by The End of Poverty. Has Diaz, Sheen, Portello or anyone working today at the Schalkenbach Foundation read it? One has to wonder if anyone who has read George could lend a hand to the production of the screed of mistruths and error that is The End of Poverty. I prefer to be subtler, but this movie does not allow it.

Kudos to the American Interest for publishing this (and a few other) great pieces.

And yes, I too was curious about the Schalkenbach Foundation. Calling them out was something of a surprise that certainly catches the attention of places like Kauffman where our support is rarely noticed so openly. I'll be curious to see if and how they reply.

The Next Economic Wave

A recent Time magazine article pointed out that many people see the recession as a good opportunity to start a new company: "At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company. Possibly a very profitable company. Let's call these start-ups LILOs, for 'a little in, a lot out.' These are Web-based businesses that cost almost nothing to get off the groundyet can turn into great moneymakers."

Indisputably, the Internent has fundamentally changed the dynamics of not only starting new companies but also starting up in a recession. If it's cheaper and easier now with this technology, perhaps Web-based firms offer one promising route out of the recession and onto a long-term growth trajectory.

The Internet, obviously, is relatively new. But the underlying story--about startups and recessions and economic growth--is an old one. The very nature of technological change and economic growth is the rise and fall of successive waves of entrepreneurs. The early New England textile manufacturers became an elite whose names (Cabot, Lowell) still today signify distinguished pedigree. Part of the reason Los Angeles became the center of the film industry was that many of the entrepreneurs were driven out of New York by the established (such as they were) companies and individuals. We can replay the same story with FM radio, software, search engines, etc. 

A generation of entrepreneurs becomes the next generation's elite, the position of whom is then challenged by newer entrepreneurs. Henri Pirenne knew this; Joseph Schumpeter and his intellectual cousins, the Austrian economists and German historicists, knew this. We are apparently rediscovering it today.

Research we have been working on the Kauffman Foundation, soon to be released, will confirm this broad theme. Recessions don't seem to matter all that much to entrepreneurs--they act as their own economic stimulus package. The most pertinent policy question, then, concerns what actions we should take or not take such that we don't squash the next emergent economic wave.

From the "Sentences We Never Thought We'd See" Department

Strong banks will be allowed to repay federal bailout funds, but only if such a move passes a test to determine whether it is in the national economic interest, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing a senior U.S. administration official.

Link here (emphasis added).

Tyranny Trap: Land of No Growth

This story about North Korean defectors in the Washington Post is riveting (hat tip Paul Kedrosky):

They filter into South Korea at the rate of about 35 a week, usually after months or years in China and an arduous detour through Vietnam, Burma or Thailand. About 15,000 defectors have settled in the South, with 4,000 arriving in the past two years.

Seoul does not encourage North Koreans to defect. But once they arrive, the South Korean government quietly grants them citizenship, gives them an apartment and tries to teach them how not to sink in an education-obsessed capitalist culture.

* * *

A new U.N. human rights report describes North Korea as a place where ordinary people "live in fear and are pressed to inform on each other. The state practices extensive surveillance of its inhabitants. . . . Authorities have bred a culture of pervasive mistrust."

The story references a survey of North Korean defectors published by the Peterson Institute last January, which I just discovered. (Disclaimer: it ws co-authored by one of my dissertation advisers, Stephan Haggard). The conclusion that "When questioned about governance and the economy, the refugees’ collective evaluation of the regime, its intentions, and accomplishments is overwhelmingly negative..." tells us that even the most oppressive state control has not been able to maintain popular support.

Why is North Korea important?

One might argue that the hell that is North Korea is unimportant, a sad reality that some places are just not as prosperous and fortunate as others. But its existence is profound, confirming that an Orwellian state is possible.

It is a haunting place to contemplate, North Korea. The level of poverty may be no worse than the average country in 1500. Perhaps better. However, if human misery is measured by oppression and fear, it is difficult to imagine a sadder place in all of history.

The situation is such not just because there is an absence of prosperity, but because the country is ruled by tyranny in a world of plenty. Visions of plenty are intolerable to impoverished tyrants, and either they give way to change (and economic revolution easily spills over to political revolution) or they intensify their oppression with extreme propoganda and paranoia. Indeed, development economists often speak of poverty traps, but North Korea is a special case. It is a tyranny trap.  And how can we resolve a tyranny trap?

The contrast between two economic philosophies could not be starker than North and South Korea. The North's stagnation confirms in my mind how extreme governance must be to deny the natural experience of economic growth. So often we frame growth as a question of what a soceity can do, when the real challenge is to identify government-sanctioned barriers to growth.

The Limits of Taxation: Cato edition

How high can marginal tax rates rise until the loss of work incentives becomes unbearable?  Unbearable for citizens is one aspect, but the operational aspect is probably the tolerance of governments. Taxes so high that revenues decline?  Unlikely a society can reach that point, unless of course the society is globalized. When high tax rates chase out entrepreneurs, societies will notice. This notion of tax competition is the motivation of Chris Edwards and Dan Mitchell's book  Global Tax Revolution.

Though the book focuses mainly on the mobility of capital rather than labor, Chapter 5 is all about "Mobile Brains and Mobile Wealth." It starts with the surprising fact that "the number of people living outside their country of birth has doubled since 1980, from 100 million to 200 million."

Although the authors hold that tax competition is the driving force in knowledge economy immigration, but much of this chapter is a review of the many factors that favor higher rates of immigration. The fall of communism (which walled in its citizens) is surely one key factor. The new economy with higher rates of churn is another. But the basic forces of globalization - cheaper intercontinental travel and internet communication - are a third force that promises to intensify. Trade agreements and political unions (like the EU) are a fourth factor. Finally, the fifth factor is the policy innovation of immigration "points" systems in places like Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. Notice how these are English-speaking nations aiming, presumably, for English-speaking (American) brains.

One might read the chapter more as a critique of restrictive immigration policies than tax policies, but the authors turn to the competition among nations for wealthy people. With 31 percent of the world's 10 million millionaires, America has much to lose. But countries like Britain, with light taxation toward non domicile migrants or "nondoms" understand that only a small portion of wealth is inherited. Most wealth is created by first-generation earners / entrepreneurs. Thus, it is not the estate tax which is the most important, or even the nefarious wealth tax, but the most basic tax of all: the burden on current work and investment.

As a throwaway observation, I've long pondered the phrase "capital gains." It's a puzzle to me why gains made from investing in a firm are treated as "capital gains" just the same as gains made from creating that firm. Newsflash: I'm not an expert on this, but I can't help but wonder if an economy encourages more entrepreneurship if its tax code distinguishes between the two types of gains: capital and creative.

Back to Edwards and Mitchell ... the remainder of their Chapter 5 is a stunning world tour. The French state's hunger for tax revenue is appalling and not a little sad. With 300,000 French citizens living in Britain, numerous stories about fleeing young workers, and an internal advisory report to the government in Paris that "10,000 business leaders have left France in the last 15 years," one can't help but shudder. The wealth tax translates into an immediately unpayable burden on successful entrepreneurs whose illiquid firms are valued highly.

Germany, Italy, even Britain have their own weaknesses, but America is one the least responsive to the growing policy competition. The U.S. still has powerful advantages, but it does not seem to realize how quickly they are eroding.

The sources of innovation are ...

 

The chart above comes from our recent survey of economics bloggers. For me, the results showed what I hope but were disappointing in that every source of innovation that we listed got a "Gentleman's B" or higher. 

The good news is that all of our policymakers think innovation is a good thing, growth is a good thing, and so on. The bad news is they still act on that instinct with classic "spend more" solutions. Innovation is not a rope that can be pushed. If it was, then funding more R&D would make sense. But in isolation, R&D spending won't get an economy very far.

Our panel of experts believes that the most important source of innovation is the "small start-up firm" which is in contrast to the venture-financed firms. In all fairness, the panel did not rate users, tinkerers, and garage entrepreneurs very highly either. That viewpoint is epitomized by the excellent research from Eric Von Hippel, and my guess is that still not enough people are familiar with it. Here's a quote from his 2005 book (which is freely available as a PDF at the link above):

The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities.

Tyler Cowen's 8 Minutes

As Tyler mentioned first on his blog, our video team assembled this 8-minute video of highlights from his interview at the Economics Bloggers Forum.  It's tremendous (kudos to Matt Pozel and Matt Long) and we sure appreciate Tyler taking time to sit down with us. 

Knowledge Economy Immigration

Bob Litan and I have a new policy paper on high-skill immigration downloadable as of today

Download Knowledge_Economy_Immigration_Policy_Apr6

and I'm coincidentally doing a presentation on Capitol Hill on Monday late morning (somewhere ... my PC started hacking a few hours ago -- so am unable to figure out the exact location.  I believe the time is 1115 or 1130, and Vivek Wadwha will be presenting as well).  In any case, here is my powerpoint.  Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Download Kane Knowledge Economy Immigration

UPDATE: The event, organized by the public forum institute (http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/pde/) is here:

Monday,
April 6, 2009

11:15a - 12:30p

Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2318
(House Committee on Science and Technology)

The Wall Street Journal Profiles Kauffman's CEO and President

Kauffman president, Carl J. Schramm, is profiled in this weekend's Wall Street Journal. 

What Does it Feel Like to Live Through History?

A colleague recently suggested that what the United States and global economies are experiencing is no mere cyclical contraction of ordinary proportions. It is, instead, a large-scale structural shift in the underlying character of economic activity. There does appear to be, at all levels, a recognition that what some have called the "Great Recession" is a transition, that the U.S. economy on the other side of this looks much different from what came before. This perhaps helps explain the ambition of President Obama's inaugural budget.

Structural changes do periodically occur: the last severe recession, in the early 1980s, marked a distinct break with the industrial economy and the rebirth of entrepreneurial capitalism. The Great Depression and World War Two sped the concentration of manufacturing output in giant firms--in the early 1930s, large companies (of 10,000 or more employees) represented only 10 percent of manufacturing output. By 1950, thanks to wartime contracts, that had jumped to one-third. Government also played a much larger economic role by 1950. 

What was probably the farthest-reaching structural change of American history came in the last third of the nineteenth century. The average citizen in 1900 lived in a fundamentally different economy and society than in 1850. Communication and transportation advances revolutionized life--it simply wasn't conceivable to send messages or goods across the country quickly before the telegraph and railroad. The nature of economic activity, moreover, came to be characterized by not just corporations led by managers, but corporations of theretofore unimaginable size and scope. 

We look back on those periods today and can readily perceive the changes because we know how things turned out. But what does it feel like to live through a historically significant structural change? Well, it turns out that it feels pretty historic. There are headlines we probably never thought we'd see ("Detroit's Fate Sealed in West Wing"). There are government deficits the size of which few probably ever bothered to even consider ($1 trillion!). And while we may not yet be at the point of a Ghostbusters-style apocalypse ("Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!"), some things seem downright batty. What were the Vegas odds eight months ago on Paul Krugman turning against Obama?

In the midst of such history-shaping markers, there are two darker feelings afoot. One is distress over the decline of what are perceived to be staples of American life, e.g., the Detroit auto companies and newspapers. The other is anxiety that nothing of equal merit or heft will arise to replace these and other sectors, including finance, which played a larger and larger role in the U.S. economy over the past two decades. Where will the next wave of jobs be? Will we all be consigned to low-end service jobs?

The standard lexicon of economics, replete with equilibrium and multipliers, seems to offer little insight into these structural changes. Even the term "structural shift" feels antiseptic. Joseph Schumpeter has made frequent posthumous appearances on behalf of his famous term "creative destruction." New companies and industries incessantly arise to replace those that die or are destroyed. Not surprisingly, Schumpeter's analysis was based on that last great structural shift of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Still, however, any descriptive term using "destruction" doesn't exactly convey feelings of warmth.

But Schumpeter did point out that any set of economic arrangements, however permanent and insuperable it appears, is always transitory. Any competitive advantage a company may achieve is always challenged--the ground is constantly shifting beneath their feet.

Economies, in this way of seeing, are like kaleidoscopes--this was the insightful observation of G.L.S. Shackle, a mid-twentieth century economist who has since been relegated to the academic dustbin. Everything in an economy is constantly in tumult, some sectors falling, some sectors rising--at certain points it all seems to come into focused order. Only, of course, to disperse again.

Sometimes we can perceive this--another shift today appears to be a transfer of power from the West to emerging countries, particularly in finance. Often, however, we simply cannot perceive the long-term changes that become the basis of the next set of kaleidoscopic order and mess. The reason is that every seemingly stable economic order begins as a chaotic mess of experiments, of variations. Clay Shirky points out that this is already occurring in the newspaper industry.

At these times, at varying degrees in different sectors, we can't tell what will eventually settle down or for how long. The most promising thing we can do from a policy standpoint is somehow encourage such variation. But of course this is the glory and agony of capitalism, reflecting the reach of human capability and our allergies toward change and uncertainty.