Ben Slade

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says [Simon Johnson] former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund [and current MIT Professor], is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.

If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

James Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair of Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas, says that the currently proposed reforms of Wall Street are woefully inadequate. Specifically:

• "More discipline on existing players to prevent abuses that led to disaster last year." This includes restrictions on executive compensation and criminal investigations of past abuses (as we'll discuss in a subsequent segment.) He also advocates a tax on financial transactions to reduce churning and short-term volatility.
• "A total restructuring of the system itself." Galbraith believes many institutions dubbed "too big to fail" should be either broken up or wound down. Generally speaking, "the financial sector grew far too much in relation to the economy in the last 15 years," he says.
• "It doesn't serve any larger purpose to have such a huge presence of financial institutions in the economy. It creates a predominance of casino activity."

Some written material is merely "text" and can be absorbed equally well regardless of medium. I've claimed that I like reading novels just as much on a Kindle as in printed form. All that matters is a novel is the words. But some material is designed for something other than a computer screen, and is best absorbed from printed pages, with illustrations and thought-through layout. Most of what's in a good magazine is in this category. Long, narrative articles are simply better to read on a sequence of pages, with illustrations and margins and call-out text, than as clicked-through screens.

I'm saying: subscribe to our magazine (The Atlantic Monthly) because you'll enjoy it more that way. And: subscribe because you should! Anyone who worries about the "crisis of the press" has a chance to do something about it for two bucks a month.

An article in the Communications of the ACM (March 2009, vol 52 #3) makes software engineering sound just slightly better than a voodoo ritual (no disrespect to voodoo intended). I would also ask a related question, "does computer science have anything to do with software engineering?". For example, objected oriented design is the accepted software design methodology today, but what science exactly is behind this? CS seems to deal with the logic and complexity of algorithms, but that's really a very small part of software engineering.

Anyway, here are some quotes from the article:

In its most general form, the "engineering process" consists of a repeated cycle through requirements, specifications, prototypes, and testing. In software engineering, the process models have evolved into several forms that range from highly structured preplanning (waterfalls, spirals, Vs, and CMM) to relatively unstructured agile (XP, SCRUM, Crystal, and evolutionary). No one process is best for every problem.

Despite long experience with these processes, none consistently delivers reliable, dependable, and affordable software systems. Approximately one-third of software projects fail to deliver anything, and another third deliver something workable but not satisfactory. Often, even successful projects took longer than expected and had significant cost overruns. Large systems, which rely on careful preplanning, are routinely obsolescent by the time of delivery years after the design started. Faithful following of a process, by itself, is not enough to achieve the results sought by engineering...

software engineering literature ... relies heavily on software anecdotes and draws very lightly from other engineering fields. Walter Tichy found that fewer than 50% of the published software engineering papers tested their hypotheses, compared to 90% in most other fields.

The authors argue that license fees, regulations and patents are now so misused that they drive up the cost of creation and slow down the rate of diffusion of new ideas. Levine explains, "Most patents are not acquired by innovators hoping to protect their innovations from competitors in order to get a short term edge over the rest of the market. Most patents are obtained by large corporations who have built portfolios of patents for defense purposes, to prevent other people from suing them over patent violations."

Boldrin and Levine promote a drastic reform of the patent system in their book. They propose the law should be restored to match the intent of the U.S. Constitution which states: Congress may "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries."

According to IEEE's Spectrum magazine, "from now on, you can get a U.S. patent only on a mousetrap—not on the idea of catching mice".

On 30 October 2008, the much-maligned “business method” patent died at the hand of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the very court that had given birth to it a decade earlier. The occasion was the case of In re Bilski, and although the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to utter the last word, the overwhelming likelihood is that you will no longer be able to patent the newest way of making a buck. If you want to protect new modes of shopping, delivering legal services, reserving a rest room on an airplane, or settling futures contracts, don’t ask the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) for help.

An actual "business method" patent on the concept of using a laser pointer to play with a cat:

Now that not a single Republican has voted for President Obama's stimulus package (even though it is chock full of compromises to please the Republicans) the promise of bipartisan politics seems more fantasy than probability.

Along these lines, Andrew Ferguson of the weeklystandard.com essentially says bipartian politics is a contradiction in terms. Sort of like a jumbo shrimp:

"Obama's chief fantasy is that he's a politician who will relieve us of the burden of [conflictual] politics. He may wind up, like Reagan, a successful president. But if he does, it will be because, like Reagan, he engaged his ideological and political opponents in ferocious battles and beat them."

I've debated whether I should bother posting anymore criticsms of the Bush presidency. After all, it's pretty obvious that it's a disaster, militarily, economically, environmentally, and so on. But these comments by Time's Joel Klein (Bush's Last Days: The Lamest Duck, 11/26/2008) are just too good to pass up:

"At the end of a presidency of stupefying ineptitude, he has become the lamest of all possible ducks"

"...a presidency that has wobbled between two poles — overweening arrogance and paralytic incompetence"

"In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one."