The WSJ has a front page article about "Avoiding Innovation's Terrible Toll". The toll in question is Kodak and Barnes&Noble's demise. I'm very old and was just reminded of my mortality (this morning, a 50 y.o. anastesiologist fell dead in Meir Hosp.) but I am for change. Old is bad, decaying, must be destroyed; new and striving is good. Innovation cannot, should not be avoided. The toll has to be paid.
I think that the cause of all innovation is government's rapacity and regulation. I mean, once a business starts to work on a rutine and predictable way, the government or the nearest people with power will take it over and regulate it. The goal of regulation is mostly to create stability and predictability. An area occupied by the bureaucracy is dead for outsiders. If outsiders are forced by the circumstances to look for a living, they will try out new things and new businesses in yet uncolonized areas. If they are really desperate and they have no way of return, they will do miracles. Like the Puritans in New England, like the Huguenots in South Africa, like the Jews in Western Europe and America.
Innovation comes by way of desperate people. In these days, the Chinese are the most desperate people on the planet and will bring the next wave of innovation. Here in boycotted Israel we still have a deep reservoir of desperation. The British people is also building up bitterness and desperation, they may still break out once more. The pic shows the commander of the HMS Beagle that shot himself in Puerto Hambre, on the Magellan. Out of desperation.
20 comments:
Your hypothesis breaks down a bit concerning the European Jews. When they were most impoverished, desperate and under threat in Eastern Europe, they accomplished fairly little other than survival. When they were somewhat better off in America or Western Europe (in some cases much better off - e.g. Meyerbeer, Felix Mendelssohn), they achieved a great deal.
The real toll of innovation that the WJS article doesn't discuss is the massive unemployment it creates. Particularly when the economy is weak, there aren't enough jobs in related fields to absorb everyone laid off. Most of these people don't possess the IQ or basic knowledge necessary to innovate in engineering, physics, computing, etc. Unfortunately, adding to the large pool of permanently idle hands is a potential setup for violent leftist revolution. Even if doesn't come to that, the presence of a huge underclass causes an aura of pessimism to pervade the whole society. Neither the leftist revolution nor the huge underclass bodes well for innovation in the long term.
You are wrong about Eastern European Jewry. I daresay that 90% of Poland industry, trade, finance, science, etc. was done by Jews. In Hungary I know for sure: everything was done by Jews, even Hungarian literature and journalism was 95% "Jewish". The absurd is that Hungarians are proud of "Hungarian" Nobel Prize winners, Hungarian Hollywood stars and so on, yet they are ALL Jews and no one is ethnic Hungarian. In Hungary, after 70 years with almost no Jews, you cannot find other factories than those founded by pre-WWII Jews. I think in Poland it is similar. Jews were not invisible nor inactive in East Europe.
The WSJ article does not discuss unemployment because innovation does not create unemployment. There is no Kodak pictures, but people is taking and using more pictures than ever. There is no more Barnes and Noble, but literary creation is stronger than ever, and the literature market is larger than ever. I feel you would have joined the Luddites who protested against innovation by destroying mechanized looms.
Hungary and its Jews were relatively prosperous in the late 19th century. Conspicuously more prosperous than the mass of Polish Jews. Even Poland was starting to become more prosperous by the late 19th century, but the accomplishments of the Polish Jews in Poland was modest comapared to the accomplishments of the descendants of Polish Jews outside of it.
Innovation can create more unemployment. All of the people who worked in Kodak factories or in sales in book stores are out of work. Most people who take digital photos aren't paid to do so. Yes, it's easier to publish, but now that anyone can disseminate their works, it's harder to achieve blockbuster status or even earn a decent living from writing (never an easy feat).
I'm not a Luddite, but it is worth considering the human costs of innovation if only so as to be able to figure out some way to prevent a violent leftist revolution. Perhaps soma or virtual reality pods as in the Matrix movies?
There have been intelligent ethnic Hungarians, J. Baron Eotvos, Janos Bolyai and Bela Bollobas come to mind, and I'm sure there were others.
In the memorial book for my father's shtetl, there is a picture of the town's electric generator. And standing next to it is its proud owner, a bearded Orthodox Jew. The postwar Haredim/ welfare kings are a new breed - before the war, Jews of all types, including the most frum, were known for their entrepreneurial spirit in Poland, ranging from the smallest tavern or fishmonger to the owners of the largest textile factories in Lodz. Trade and business was the very reason why Jews were invited into Poland by the Polish kings to begin with. Jews also formed a disproportionate % of university students until the numerus clausus were imposed.
K
It's wrong to focus on jobs lost or to try to plug the dike of innovation - the tax money or regulation that is used to retard the pace or consequences of change acts like sand in the gears of the economy - it only slows down the pace (at a high cost) but does not change inevitable outcome. This is one reason why Obama's policies have slowed the recovery (and rigid EU policies have slowed theirs even more). For every job lost at some overaged centralized giant like Kodak, the new economy forms more jobs in a thousand different places that can't be picked up in a news story. Think of all the oil portrait painters who were put out of business by Kodak - that's how creative destruction goes. If you are not on the bus of innovation then you are under the bus.
K
K,
The "new economy" of information technology has created jobs for the highly intelligent who also happen to have the appropriate educational background (CS, mathematics, etc.) and interests. A lot of people put out of work by creative destruction possess neither the raw intelligence nor the training to innovate in IT or even to work for the innovators in that sector. They aren't able to get on the bus of innovation. That's my whole point. Not that we should hinder innovation but that all the discontented idle hands are a threat to the gains of the innovators.
Any idea as to what to do with these people K, the displaced ones? Be interested to hear your thoughts on what actually works for these folks.
Anon.
The largest occupational category in Victorian England was "domestic servant". We are now a servantless society, yet that would solve the occupational problem for the uneducated poor.
About finding occupation for the unemployable, we have the successful model of Israeli Beduins. When I was a bureaucrat, I had to be present in several debates on the subject. Beduins are a large low IQ group squatting in public lands in the Negev, with criminal traditions and tendencies (assaulting caravans and so on - read Ibn Saud's biography). The goal was to integrate the Beduin into Israeli society and settle them down, at any cost. One of the successful ideas was to foment Beduin folk dance circles, subsidized by the government, with the idea that any activity that takes their minds off crime (say stealing cars), is well worth advancing. At certain time Israel fomemented religion - the Islam - but that initiative backfired.
Are the Beduin religious in Israel?
Anon.
Lately, yes. It was the idiotic policy of theIsraeli government ot subsidize Muslim religion and Muslim organizations such as the HAMAS in order to counter the influence of FATAH, which is a secular Socialist (like Baath) political movement. In Lebanon we created and cultivated the Hizballah, also a Muslim religious movement, much dedicated to social work among the poor. In Israel we financed many mosques )to settle the nomads( and muslim religious schools. Who could imagine that the muslim religion would become so extremist and violent? We were busy fighting Arab secular nationalism, we had no trouble with religion.
??? Israel had no hand in the formation of Hizballah.
Haha. I was there, my friend. We needed Lebanese allies to fight our enemy that was the Fatah. Sharon allied us with the Maronites, who draw us to places we didnt want to be. In the South there were only Muslims and Druze, the Druze were friendly but few, we needed Muslim allies but it boomeranged badly. We Israelis were the first in modern times to thread in War Anthropology and made many mistakes. The American Army in Irak and Afganistan are much better than we were.
Well, we DID achieve our goal that was to disarm the Palestinians in Lebanon, specially in Tzur and Tzidon. People have forgotten about them.
The whole point of markets is that no one person is smart enough to think of everything. I don't have to find a job for the displaced - they can find their own in a market economy. There is no one answer, there are a million different answers.
There was an article in the NYT this week about a shortage of the drugs used to treat attention deficit. They are amphetamines and so the Drug Enforcement Agency limits the overall quantity produced to prevent abuse. Each year the DEA decides, Soviet style, the total # of doses that will be manufactured and allocates that quota among the manufacturers, in precisely the way that was done in the Soviet Union. Guess what - there are now shortages of these drugs and sick people can't get their medications. Central planning never ever works because no bureaucrat no matter how wise has as much access to information as millions of individuals.
K
It doesn't have to be the government that handles the issue of the mass of potentially permanently unemployed. It's potentially an entrepeneurial opening or an opportunity to acquire cheap labor for those with means. The servant option doesn't appeal to me because I don't trust most people enough even to want them around, but it might appeal to others.
Anyway, it is not wise to ignore the issue of discontented unfortunates entirely, and I think that we Jews of all people would see that. Troubled economic times and masses of dicontented poor do not bode well for Jewish communities.
Dear K, A poor man is like a dead man, it doesnt count, as said in the Talmud and much quoted by my Father z"l. We must fear instead the discontented lower middle class, like Herr Hitler and his followers.
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