We have been at this blog for twelve years. Looking back, the initiation was when I was still at MIT working with doctoral and Post Docs and as the then new administration came on the scene. I was not an economist by training but had mastered many of the techniques while dealing with regulatory agencies. There was and remains a massive divide between economics and the real world. I was concerned about what the then new administration was proposing. There was a "financial crisis" due primarily to the alleged fraudulent lending practices and monetization of the less than reliable loans. The banks behind this collapse were looking to escape not only free of any responsibility but actually profiting from the actions.
Here were some of my evolving thoughts:
1. The Romer Curve: Some economist from California came to the White House and before even stepping indoors detailed a month-by-month plan on how their proposal would reduce unemployment. I followed her projections and reality. Not once was her projection even close to reality over the three years I followed it. So much for economists. Trillions were dumped on the economy.
2. "Shovel Ready Projects": This was one of the biggest scams ever. Hundreds of billions purported to be spent on projects in infrastructure. The only result I saw in my four years of weekly car travel to and from MIT were the signs. Lots of signs telling of some pending project, none of which I ever saw even started. Governments often live off of slogans, a few make sense but most and pure palaver. This one was just an excuse to enrich the coffers of God knows who.
3. "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor": Back to health care for me. It was clear then new administration wanted to nationalize medicine. Needless to say I was against it. The Government cannot deliver the mail nor run a railroad. Why in God's name would you allow it to deal with life and death. The ACA became a massive and, in my opinion, abusive legal dictum from Washington. A typical example was the demand for an electronic health care network. The HER is a useless burden and has not usefulness for the ultimate user, the patient. Over this period members of Congress and State legislators had attempted to totally destroy any type of individual health care and mandate a centralized system. Their intent is total Government control under their own proscriptive.
4. "You did not create that business by yourself, the Government helped you": This one sent me into a bit of a flurry. How did the Government help me in Russia? Yes Russia! Thanks to my Russian colleagues, now considered enemies, I managed to build an infrastructure across central and Eastern Europe. Did the then President and his cronies help. No. Did the Russians, yes. It was all at my own personal risk, time, money, insight, and totally devoid of the US Government. In fact, I had to move from New Jersey to Prague to get reliable electricity and field service competence. In reality what I accomplished was despite the US Government not as a result of its support.
5. Cancer can be cured: Over this period, I saw and had the good fortune to be involved in the development of a variety of new treatments for cancer, and in some cases seeing cures for the first time. This achievement was the result of new "tools" like Next Gen Sequencing and the hard work of the physicians, scientists and engineers in the process. Unlike the Silicon Valley billionaires who created "hot air" and "civil unrest", the biotech industry was the one true positive jump forward. However, as we noted, much of this expertise not just leaked but flowed out to China.
6. The COVID Plague: The last year we have seen the strangest development in humanity, the COVID plague. The role of Government to lead and assure the citizens that it can be overcome has turned into an ongoing war of abject hatred between parties. The COVID plague has demonstrated that "science" has turned into a religion, and if one is a practitioner of the approved denomination then their word is divine otherwise it is anathema. Unfortunately, science is problematic. As medical student are often told, what they have learned at the end of Med School will at best be half correct when they commence their professional life. Melanoma was a death sentence and now it can be "cured". CML was a death sentence now, at worst, a chronic annoyance treated with a generic drug. The COVID vaccine is the result of having the tools to do what was needed and the people to make it so.
7. Networks, Security, and Incompetence: Billions were dropped from helicopters to fund rural broadband and yet it is argued by many that nothing happened. Why have we seen such massive security threats? Simple, the Government has amassed a collection of politicians and lacks the technical and intel competence demanded.
8. Social Networks and Social Anarchy: Just after Facebook broke at Harvard my MIT students insisted that I join in. I did, for a short while, but soon saw the serious flaws in such a system. First for any adversary it provided the most powerful psychological profiling system ever created. In the 1970s we always wanted to get profiles of our Soviet adversaries, and oftentimes we received long profiles based on hearsay at best. Yet Facebook, circa 2008, was a perfect platform to see how an individual would respond to various stimuli. Furthermore, it was also a brilliant propaganda tool. Thus, in just a few short weeks I was in and then out. It clearly was too dangerous a tool to be left in the hands of immature and highly egotistical children. The same held for Twitter and my brief encounter. Yet the risk to the social media companies is that the alleged "value" they provide may be ephemeral. Just look at Facebook. Before it there was MySpace, and other similar environments online. Thus, what stops someone from creating a truly Balkanized environment, further intensifying the divide. Indeed, with newspapers for decades that is what happened. People have already self-segmented themselves off-line so why not on-line. The value chain can be easily broken here.
9. The Revival of Marxism: As I have noted on many occasions my Grandmother was a major player in early 20th century socialism having run for office both nationally and in New York as a leader of the Socialist Party. Yet then the issues were clean water and food, safe working conditions, fair wages, and most everything we agree to today. Also there was racial equality and the women's right to vote. Now the so-called socialists are fundamentally proto-Marxists. Instead of improving the lives of the individual then seek the destruction of the individual and the establishment of the state as a sine qua non and their dictates controlling such a state.
10. The destruction of the Academy: I often wonder if I could ever be admitted into MIT now, even after all I may have done. I still recall be denied admission to Columbia because I was a Catholic, the letter written and signed by Dean Donald Barr, strangely enough the father of the outgoing Attorney General. Stranger even more is that I became a Professor at Columbia and now am on Boards at the Med School and Hospital. Perhaps I could be admitted to Columbia now, but alas I doubt the same could be said for MIT. Proto-Marxism is infiltrating all ranks of Academia. It goes beyond just political correctness; it is akin the Mao and The Great Leap Forward.
11. China: From 2005 thru 2012 I had a bunch of doctoral students. All but one remained in the US and not a one them a US citizen. Many were Chinese nationals. I could see many more getting trained at MIT and returning to China and worse they were funded by the US Government, even worse by DoD and its related organization. I often worried about what I called the "Yamamoto syndrome", the Admiral whose attack on Pearl Harbor is infamous and whose education was at Harvard. We often worried about the IP in high tech such as electronics. I worried about biotech and not only controlling therapeutics but also controlling bio elements of warfare. Then came COVID.
12. Russia: Russia could have been an allay but for. The "but fors" started in the Clinton Administration when the US sent masses of Business School academics to Russia and their efforts created oligarchs. The in the Balkans the US fought against the Orthodox Christians, and this worried Moscow. Then in the administration from 2008-2016 Russia was treated to various overt undermining such as State Department dignitaries personally intervening in elections and promoting adversarial relations with Moscow. Then of course we have had the last four years. What could have been a Kissingerian policy of using Russia to re balance China, resulted in the state of having a pile of adversaries and no allies.
13. Trust: Finally, there is the issue of trust. Dave Staelin, a former colleague at MIT, introduced me to this issue. I had never given much thought to it, for in the Reagan years the phrase "trust but verify" was used regarding the Soviets. To anyone attuned to the language, trust did not exist, and one had to verify. I had spent the 70s doing some of that while in DC. In the intel world, trust is the last thing one ever thinks of. In fact, the three prime directives are; trust no one, never put it in writing, and always have a second exit. Well just look at the last decade. Trust is gone, everybody puts it in writing (email is the culprit) and there are no second exits, they all go out the front door. But the issue is trust. Can we trust politicians? No. Can we now even trust our elections? I really have doubts based upon my personal experiences here in New Jersey (loss of secret ballot, multiple mail in ballots, delayed counting well after declared results, and a Postal Service refusing to deliver the mail, just to name the few I was exposed to with the mandatory mail in process). Loss of trust is a serious problem. Marriages cannot survive, business fail, and governments collapse. Perhaps the greatest loss since I began this blog is trust in anyone and anything. The left does not trust the right and vice versa. It is very hard to regain trust, for once lost it is often nonreturnable.
14. "The electronic transaction, information and entertainment" market: People buy most everything online. In 1980 when I went to Warner, my boss, Gus Hauser, wanted me to create an on-line system to do all three of the above. We had a 2-way cable system called QUBE and I had a team of brilliant folks willing to try to do the job. We accomplished it in two years so by 1982 we had the system in proof-of-concept mode in New York and Pittsburgh. The problem was we were too early. I had IBM PCs,. Hayes Modems, and early versions of color monitors. We had banks, travel companies, Atari and Warner films, Department Stores, and a complete mix. Unfortunately, some of our Board thought it was a dumb idea, for they stated no one would ever shop or be entertained or bank this way. Some of these futurists went on to head major information age companies, and perhaps were later astute enough to see what they missed. The biggest loss were the dozen patents which were prepared but never filed. Warner unfortunately, under new management, also though there was no future. Amazon is about half way to accomplishing what we did forty years ago. The lesson, never be too early.
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