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Yearly Archives: 2014

Maglev Trains in Our Future

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Is the US ready for high speed rail? If The NorthEast Maglev (TNEM) gets its way, a solid demonstration project between Baltimore and Washington might be built sometime in the future for an undisclosed amount of money. The project is hardly scoped out yet, but the promise of being able to rocket between the cities at over 300 mph (500 kph) has attracted attention – and $5B in potential backing from the Central Japan Railway, the Bank of Japan, and the Japanese government. It’s a good downpayment on the guesstimated $10-15B the line will take.

How serious is this proposal? The government of Japan would love to start exporting some of its best technology, and it’s hard to pass up that kind of dough. And if TNEM gets their way, it’ll go on from there on a 240 mile line from Washington to New York, making the trip in just one hour. How much will that cost? The guesstimate of $100B is such a round number that you know it’s vague. But it’s a tantalizing worth investigating for a lot of reasons – and the money would come from private investors, not any government.

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Skills Gap?

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Is there a “skills gap”? Many economists and policy wonks have debated whether or not persistent unemployment is related to a lack of workers with just the right training to fill today’s jobs. JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon famously wrote an argument in favor of a lack of skills as the major problem, which Paul Krugman then proceeded to tear apart. The arguments continue back and forth with little resolution.

So is there such a problem? The short answer is “no”, but the long answer is “yes”. An excellent piece by James Besson in Harvard Business Review (HBR) un-asks the question neatly and shows that there is indeed a problem developing the right skills in a changing economy – but it’s not something we can fix simply by changing what kids learn in college. It’s much more endemic to a dynamic, open economy all around.

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Labor Creates All Wealth

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As Democrats contemplate the possibility of losing the Senate, there are many ways we can handle it.  We could all sit in the back and throw stuff, much as the Republicans did for the last few years.  We could turn on each other and rip our own guts out in a festival of shame and blame.  Or, if we’re intent on really standing up to our principles, we can use this time away from being the responsible ones and understand what it is that we, as a party really stand for.

We have a lot to offer if we can only get it together for once.  But I, for one, think it’s going to take a much deeper understanding of our core values and what is really happening around us before we can make it happen.

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A Can’t Lose War He Can’t Fight

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Russian troops have invaded Ukraine, this is not in question. Whether or not they have the official sanction of Russia itself or are merely “on vacation” fighting for a good cause is up to the reader to decide. The main contention so far is what exactly Putin is doing by playing a very silly game by trying to invade without invading, telling the world a fairly transparent fairy tale that no one believes

I think that the key question has to lie in Putin’s head, which is to say how he is responding to the forces on him. That requires a lot of speculation in the absence of any good information. Good reporters (and bloggers) don’t go deep into speculation, so if you don’t want to read this I’ll understand. But it seems that Putin is eyeballs deep into a war he can’t lose but also can’t fight.

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Player Piano

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Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel “Player Piano” was more than his first. It was arguably the first “dystopian utopia” novel of a world carefully described and proscribed for everyone involved. Those with technical degrees were the masters of the carefully planned world, and the rest either joined the army or worked for the “Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps” building infrastructure. Government took care of everyone, but not all were happy. Rebellion steeped under the calm surface in both the working class and the unchallenged rulers.

It’s hard to not think of such a world when reading “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs” from the Pew Research Center and Elon University. A survey of 1,896 experts in technical areas were asked what they thought the future world of employment might look like – how much automation might displace workers and how many jobs it might create. The results read something like Vonnegut imagined – enough so that a little anxiety about the next economy is justified.

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