5 ms·

I think if you just discount all modern innovations then it's easy to say nothing has changed of note. My TV looks better than ever. Should I just discount that

I think if you just discount all modern innovations then it's easy to say nothing has changed of note. My TV looks better than ever. Should I just discount that as progress because it's still a picture displayed in my living room? If you suggest the iPhone 5 which allows me to get anywhere without planning with turn by turn directions, communicate with family on the road, make dinner reservations, and answer a work related question via email is not advancing anything just because the science behind it was settled in the 1970s? The amount of wealth and coordination in society to make that happen at such a low price is difficult to get your head around. It wasn't innovation policy that lead to these things though it was the result of the market providing services to people who want thme and individuals working very hard to make it happen. Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth. Combine that with taking on a lot of debt that cannot be repaid and you have a recipe for low growth. I'm afraid that any innovation policy that isn't just will just end up as gifts to those who are well connected. Part of the problem is that some of the things we have now are totally amazing and we just don't care to notice.

objclxt 14y ago
> "some of the things we have now are totally amazing and we just don't care to notice" This is very true: Kasparov is frankly wrong to say the last 'revolutionary' technology was the Apple II back in the 70s. The past thirty years since then have brought many huge technological developments with lasting impact on global society. The internet, mobile telephony, DNA sequencing and profiling... What Kasparov doesn't seem prepared to accept is that most innovation is iterative. This iteration can be compressed, but even dramatic events like the moon landings were based on decades of research and iterative development. I just can't take someone seriously who claims there has been no revolutionary tech since 1977. It undermines some of the other points Kasparov is trying to make, particularly around growth and monetary policy.
- warmwaffles 14y ago
  Kasparov did sound senile when he said that.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
hooande 14y ago
The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy. I know that most people under 30 directly credit Steve Jobs for everything that they do on their phones. But it took a massive national investment to set up the basics of the internet, which provided the iphone with enough relevant functionality to make it to a 5th version. It sounds like you're equating the leap from "radio to tv" with the leap from "tv to 1080p". There's almost no doubt that the pace of innovation is slowing. Businesses will be more than happy to make billions of dollars by taking us to iphone9 and 2160p, because that's much easier than introducing an entirely new way to interact with the world. I'm not sure if the free markets are the best solution to this particular problem. Thiel and Kasparov kind of have a point. The internet emerged from government funded DARPA research. Our communication infrastructure was built by a government granted monopoly. The moon landing, one of our species greatest achievements, was the result of a national innovation policy pissing contest with the soviets. Maybe everything would really be amazing today if we'd focused more on innovation over the last several decades.
- jerf 14y ago
  "The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy." And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances? The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources. If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did. The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)
elemenohpee 14y ago
What taxes are you talking about that are much higher than in prior periods? I've heard from a lot of investors that high taxes don't really impact their decisions. A good investment is a good investment. High taxes on middle class people however can have a stifling effect, because they don't have the extra cash to keep circulating in the economy.
- philiphodgen 14y ago
  As a (well-paid) international tax lawyer, my anecdotal evidence is that high taxes absolutely impact business and investment decisions. I too see these quotes about tax being an irrelevant item to business decisions. I call bullshit on them, and especially Warren Buffett when he says it. Tax is regulation. Just as you see the entrenched cab industry attempting to cudgel Uber out of the marketplace, so too do entrenched interests use tax law to their advantage or to their competitors' disadvantage. People who say decisions are not affected by tax are saying that decisions are made on factors other than net profit after tax. They are also assuming that all investments are made within a single taxing jurisdiction, so that it is impossible to take your money from a 40% tax jurisdiction and put it to work in a 10% tax jurisdiction. Tax is not the only factor in play for business and investment decisions. There are other factors as well. Government red tape is, in my experience, a greater deterrent to business and investment expansion than tax. A high-tax country with a highly efficient, transparent, and predictable bureaucracy (think Western Europe, with variations of course) will be more attractive than an inefficient, dunderheaded bureaucracy-ridden country with a looser tax policy (think Southern Europe). There are lessons for the United States in all of this. Why does money flee from some places? And how can the United States avoid creating the same factors that make capital flee? Don't get me started on government policies that make brains flee the country. That's an order of magnitude more damaging than watching money go away.
- prostoalex 14y ago
  > A good investment is a good investment. Only if you have the money to invest, as opposed to keeping it to cover your tax bill.
btilly 14y ago
Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. Citation needed. Actual numbers, such as the ones at http://www.deptofnumbers.com/blog/2010/08/tax-revenue-as-a-fraction-of-gdp/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/blog/2010/08/tax-revenue-as-a-f..., emphatically disagree with you.
- ianstallings 14y ago
  Those are for America. But global trends emphatically(?) disagree with you: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/business/global/03iht-srtaxlede03.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/business/global/03iht-srta...
Osmium 14y ago
> Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth. Are you sure about this? If you're talking about manufacturing regulations, I'd be more wary about buying electronics or toys manufactured in China... Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace.
- lostlogin 14y ago
  Regulations that are good for workers are important as far as I'm concerned too. And do play a factor in purchase decisions. Basically everyone is worker and consumer, so strengthening consumer and worker rights is good as far as I'm concerned.
- wpietri 14y ago
  > Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace. That's an excellent point, and one people don't consider enough. Almost nobody in the US picks up an item off the grocery store shelves and says, "Hey, is this safe?" That isn't inevitable, as China's scandals show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_the_Pe... That kind of trust in the marketplace is incredibly valuable to innovators. If only some food is safe, then people will only buy new products from known, high-value brands. A good opposite example is Facebook. At my last company we had some great ideas for useful Facebook apps. But in our user tests people had a strong learned aversion to the Facebook auth dialog; they knew that if they said ok, they might look dumb in front of all their friends. As entrepreneurs, we wanted more regulation. We would have happily paid $25k to Facebook to be part of a trusted apps program where they vetted us and then gave us a seal of approval.
drzaiusapelord 14y ago
>Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. Can we keep the libertarian troll out of these comments? Do you really want to discuss taxes? Most of my wealth is taxed via capital gains. I pay maybe half the taxes my friends pay. My dad used to run his own business in the 70s and 80s. His tax rate was unbelievable back then for his bracket. We live in a low tax low regulation period right now. There's no denying it. Sorry Mitt lost the election, but don't fret, you'll get over it.
- jswinghammer 14y ago
  Sigh. Regulations are being added at a very rapid rate. Regulations are very much taxes just in a different form. I didn't vote for Romney.
nico 14y ago
You mention something very interesting, it seems like even though science and technology advance at a really fast pace, there more developed a society/community is, the harder it is to implement and adopt new technologies, or the other way around, it is really easy for undeveloped countries to pick up new technologies, because there's no previous technology/standard to compete with.

objclxt 14y ago

> "some of the things we have now are totally amazing and we just don't care to notice" This is very true: Kasparov is frankly wrong to say the last 'revolutionary' technology was the Apple II back in the 70s. The past thirty years since then have brought many huge technological developments with lasting impact on global society. The internet, mobile telephony, DNA sequencing and profiling... What Kasparov doesn't seem prepared to accept is that most innovation is iterative. This iteration can be compressed, but even dramatic events like the moon landings were based on decades of research and iterative development. I just can't take someone seriously who claims there has been no revolutionary tech since 1977. It undermines some of the other points Kasparov is trying to make, particularly around growth and monetary policy.

warmwaffles 14y ago
Kasparov did sound senile when he said that.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

hooande 14y ago

The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy. I know that most people under 30 directly credit Steve Jobs for everything that they do on their phones. But it took a massive national investment to set up the basics of the internet, which provided the iphone with enough relevant functionality to make it to a 5th version. It sounds like you're equating the leap from "radio to tv" with the leap from "tv to 1080p". There's almost no doubt that the pace of innovation is slowing. Businesses will be more than happy to make billions of dollars by taking us to iphone9 and 2160p, because that's much easier than introducing an entirely new way to interact with the world. I'm not sure if the free markets are the best solution to this particular problem. Thiel and Kasparov kind of have a point. The internet emerged from government funded DARPA research. Our communication infrastructure was built by a government granted monopoly. The moon landing, one of our species greatest achievements, was the result of a national innovation policy pissing contest with the soviets. Maybe everything would really be amazing today if we'd focused more on innovation over the last several decades.

jerf 14y ago
"The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy." And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances? The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources. If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did. The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)

elemenohpee 14y ago

What taxes are you talking about that are much higher than in prior periods? I've heard from a lot of investors that high taxes don't really impact their decisions. A good investment is a good investment. High taxes on middle class people however can have a stifling effect, because they don't have the extra cash to keep circulating in the economy.

philiphodgen 14y ago
As a (well-paid) international tax lawyer, my anecdotal evidence is that high taxes absolutely impact business and investment decisions. I too see these quotes about tax being an irrelevant item to business decisions. I call bullshit on them, and especially Warren Buffett when he says it. Tax is regulation. Just as you see the entrenched cab industry attempting to cudgel Uber out of the marketplace, so too do entrenched interests use tax law to their advantage or to their competitors' disadvantage. People who say decisions are not affected by tax are saying that decisions are made on factors other than net profit after tax. They are also assuming that all investments are made within a single taxing jurisdiction, so that it is impossible to take your money from a 40% tax jurisdiction and put it to work in a 10% tax jurisdiction. Tax is not the only factor in play for business and investment decisions. There are other factors as well. Government red tape is, in my experience, a greater deterrent to business and investment expansion than tax. A high-tax country with a highly efficient, transparent, and predictable bureaucracy (think Western Europe, with variations of course) will be more attractive than an inefficient, dunderheaded bureaucracy-ridden country with a looser tax policy (think Southern Europe). There are lessons for the United States in all of this. Why does money flee from some places? And how can the United States avoid creating the same factors that make capital flee? Don't get me started on government policies that make brains flee the country. That's an order of magnitude more damaging than watching money go away.
prostoalex 14y ago
> A good investment is a good investment. Only if you have the money to invest, as opposed to keeping it to cover your tax bill.

btilly 14y ago

Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. Citation needed. Actual numbers, such as the ones at http://www.deptofnumbers.com/blog/2010/08/tax-revenue-as-a-fraction-of-gdp/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/blog/2010/08/tax-revenue-as-a-f..., emphatically disagree with you.

ianstallings 14y ago
Those are for America. But global trends emphatically(?) disagree with you: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/business/global/03iht-srtaxlede03.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/business/global/03iht-srta...

Osmium 14y ago

> Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth. Are you sure about this? If you're talking about manufacturing regulations, I'd be more wary about buying electronics or toys manufactured in China... Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace.

lostlogin 14y ago
Regulations that are good for workers are important as far as I'm concerned too. And do play a factor in purchase decisions. Basically everyone is worker and consumer, so strengthening consumer and worker rights is good as far as I'm concerned.
wpietri 14y ago
> Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace. That's an excellent point, and one people don't consider enough. Almost nobody in the US picks up an item off the grocery store shelves and says, "Hey, is this safe?" That isn't inevitable, as China's scandals show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_the_Pe... That kind of trust in the marketplace is incredibly valuable to innovators. If only some food is safe, then people will only buy new products from known, high-value brands. A good opposite example is Facebook. At my last company we had some great ideas for useful Facebook apps. But in our user tests people had a strong learned aversion to the Facebook auth dialog; they knew that if they said ok, they might look dumb in front of all their friends. As entrepreneurs, we wanted more regulation. We would have happily paid $25k to Facebook to be part of a trusted apps program where they vetted us and then gave us a seal of approval.

drzaiusapelord 14y ago

>Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. Can we keep the libertarian troll out of these comments? Do you really want to discuss taxes? Most of my wealth is taxed via capital gains. I pay maybe half the taxes my friends pay. My dad used to run his own business in the 70s and 80s. His tax rate was unbelievable back then for his bracket. We live in a low tax low regulation period right now. There's no denying it. Sorry Mitt lost the election, but don't fret, you'll get over it.

jswinghammer 14y ago
Sigh. Regulations are being added at a very rapid rate. Regulations are very much taxes just in a different form. I didn't vote for Romney.

nico 14y ago

You mention something very interesting, it seems like even though science and technology advance at a really fast pace, there more developed a society/community is, the harder it is to implement and adopt new technologies, or the other way around, it is really easy for undeveloped countries to pick up new technologies, because there's no previous technology/standard to compete with.