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<div>Dear Colleagues -</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Among the many newsletters I get, "Global Province" by
the versatile and indefatigable Yale alumnus William P. Dunk is
consistently worthwhile and delightful. I've previously brought him to
your attention in <<font
color="#000000"
>http://eng.yale.edu/pipermail/eas-info/2002/000381.html>, but
thought it time to do so again.</font> His latest issue follows below,
and includes subscription information.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div> --PJK</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>------------------------------------------------------------</div
>
<div>Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 10:00:01 -0400</div>
<div>Subject: GP27Sep06: Dr. Johnson's Stone<br>
To: "GlobalProvince"
<globalprovince@lyris.globalprovince.com><br>
From: "William Dunk Partners"
<advisors@beecom.net><br>
List-Unsubscribe:
<mailto:leave-globalprovince-6669195K@lyris.globalprovince.com><br
>
Reply-To: advisors@beecom.net<br>
</div>
<div><b>News from the Global Province (</b><a
href="http://www.globalprovince.com"><b>www.globalprovince.com</b></a><b
>)</b><br>
<i>The marketplace of business ideas—a site for investors, business
executives, journalists, and elitists everywhere</i>.<i> Browse
this week's additions to the site below</i>.<i> To learn more
about William Dunk Partners, see</i> <a
href="http://www.globalprovince.com/williamdunkpartners.htm"><i>
www.globalprovince.com/williamdunkpartners.htm</i></a>.<i> To
subscribe to the Global Province, simply follow this</i> <a
href="http://www.globalprovince.com/subscribe.htm"><i>
link</i></a>.</div>
<div><b>The Trouble with Theories</b>. <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley"> Bishop
Berkeley</a> held that you and I can only grasp sensations and ideas
of an object (i.e., creations of our own mind), not the object in
itself. We do not have an untarnished connection to the world outside
of ourselves: we just have an accumulation of perceptions about things
that are the products of the filters in our consciousness. Known
as “subjective idealism,” his thinking more or less said that we
could not know or posit any objective world that subsists outside the
mind’s fog. The great <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson"> Dr. Johnson</a>,
kicking a stone nearby, said, “I refute it thus.”</div>
<div>Common sense has a way of getting in the way of theories, no
matter how philosophers, ideologues, and charlatans spin their webs.
The trouble with theories is that they are just that—theories.
A stone always gets in the way. And yet believers hold to
their theories with a fervor and zeal that is normally reserved for
religion. In countries that are over the hill, common sense no
longer has a chance to assert itself, and any loony idea can take
hold.</div>
<div><b>Judge Greene</b>. Back in 1982 <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_H._Greene"> Judge Greene</a>
broke up AT & T, ending a long standing monopoly upon which
America’s universal (and we might add, inexpensive) phone service
was built. Generally it was thought that monopoly was bad and
that all sorts of advantages would accrue to our economy and to
consumers if it were shattered; marvelous new enterprises would enter
the telecommunications marketplace. A nice theory that, even if
most of us then thought our phones worked pretty well and we did not
have the foggiest notion of all the marvelous benefits that would
ensue from the decision of this novice judge. Our phone service has
gone downhill ever since.</div>
<div><b>Alfred E. Kahn</b>. <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_E._Kahn"> Alfred Kahn</a>,
an economist who has recorded stints at both Ripon and Cornell, added
ballast to Judge Greene’s decree. At both the New York Public
Service Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board he floated the
thought that if we could put deregulation together with competitive
entities, prices would fall, quality would skyrocket, and life would
be better for practically everybody. Another nice theory. The
wonderful thing about academic economists, be they Kahn or John
Kenneth Galbraith, is that they poke into the marketplace just long
enough to create confusion and dysfunction—and then, of course,
retreat back to academia. From their safe roosts, they tell us
that things would have been virtually idyllic if we had only done it
in their way. Of course, Con Edison and the New York Power Grid
has been a mess ever since, and aviation has become a horrible ordeal
for John Q. Public.</div>
<div><b>Adam Smith and David Ricardo</b>. Behind all this
monopoly busting and regulation shredding lies the economic wisdom of <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith"> Smith</a>, <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo"> Ricardo</a>, <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill"> Mill</a>, <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_Law"> Say</a>, and other
18th-century thinkers. Basically they said that a nation’s
economy would work better if it trusted the workings of the
marketplace—the invisible hand of the market—rather than the
machinations of mercantilist governments that thought they could rule
their way to wealth. But the troubles with all this good
theory are legion, two of which we detail here:</div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote><x-tab>
</x-tab></blockquote>
<blockquote>1.<x-tab> </x-tab>There
never is any such thing as a truly free market—either then or now.
So it is a bit naïve to depend on its workings. Mercantilists,
fixers, and other clever men are always messing about with the
marketplace. Everybody secretly wants to own 100% of the market:
nobody<x-tab> </x-tab>wants the
other guy to own it. Show me a ‘free marketplace,’ and I
will show you someone is secretly pulling the strings. Better
theories would advocate free markets but also gracefully incorporate
the parries and<x-tab> </x-tab>thrusts of the majority, who don’t
like competition that much, into the<x-tab> </x-tab>machinery of
trade.</blockquote>
<blockquote><x-tab>
</x-tab></blockquote>
<blockquote><x-tab>
</x-tab></blockquote>
<blockquote>2.<x-tab> </x-tab>Theories
that pretend to be universal usually turn out to most relevant to the
time and place where they are put forth. What was good for
18th-century England is not necessarily the best medicine for the
United States or China in the 21st. In fact, modern
communications have changed the cost structure of the world and
rendered obsolete some of our older notions of how trade works.
For that matter we now even admit the limits of Newton’s Laws.
By and large, the Asians, who understand the 21st century pretty well,
protect their markets until they enjoy overwhelming<x-tab>
</x-tab>market advantage: then they open them up.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<div><b>Comparative Advantage</b>. While we worship Adam Smith,
it turns out that Ricardo had a better nose for practical affairs.
First off, he made a fortune, showing he had some shrewd instincts for
how the world actually worked. Secondly, he came up with the
notion of <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage">
‘comparative advantage’</a> which, in some ways, implies that
markets, or at least national markets, have kinks in them. His <a
href=
"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573921092/globalprovince/002-5821082-6971250"><i><span
></span>Principles of Political Economy and Taxation</i></a>
“introduces the theory of comparative advantage. According to
Ricardo’s theory, even if a country could produce everything more
efficiently than another country, it would reap gains from
specialising in what it was best at producing and trading with other
nations (Case & Fair, 1999: 812-818). Ricardo believed that
wages should be left to free competition, so there should be no
restrictions on the importation of agricultural products from abroad.”
In practice, a nation should specialize even if it does a lot of
things terribly well. It is not a foregone conclusion that any
one nation should continue in an industry, even if it is more
efficient than other nations at the game, especially if a poorer
nation has achieved productivity in the same industry that exceeds its
national average of all industries. Put bluntly, the paradox is
that the best players on the globe may not survive in a world of
comparative advantage. The marketplace works rather
imperfectly.</div>
<div><b>The Failure of Deregulation</b>. We calculate that even
if there were free markets, they would work imperfectly. And we
would suggest that deregulation in the last quarter of the 20the
century, an idea that flows out of free market theory, has not worked
out for the United States. The very industries that have been
deregulated—phones, electricity, airlines, railroads, etc.—have
only been partially deregulated and the price competition is hardly
robust. Chaos and quality breakdowns have infested each of these
markets. To varying degrees, we have simply substituted
unregulated monopolies for regulated monopolies and now enjoy the
worst of both worlds—a cruel mixture of unbridled markets and
government muckabout.</div>
<div><b>Falling Behind in Phones and the Internet</b>. What’s
happened instead is that we have fallen behind the rest of the world
in our phones, and the same thing promises to happen on the Internet.
These are both strategic building blocks for the so-called Knowledge
Economy that we think we have to become.</div>
<div><b>Mobile Phones</b>. Our mobile phones beautifully illustrate
our predicament. We essentially have a few monopoly players in
mobile phones who have built redundant but incompatible networks that
underserve certain parts of the country. Neither the networks
nor the phones themselves are durably and correctly built. We
pay too much for the service: we have previously commented that one of
our employees has been able to call home to Indiana more cheaply from
Germany than he could from any of our offices. We have too much
inefficient competition in network design and construction, and
virtually no competition at the point of distribution, such that
Cingular and Verizon, the two big providers, today offer you identical
plans.</div>
<div>Of the major countries, Japan today offers the most advanced
networks, and is early to the party with innovations. For
instance, it did a quick roll out of <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G"> 3G technology</a>. We
have advised certain of our telecommunication clients to be well
placed in Japan in order to keep ahead of the learning curve and not
fall behind as has happened in the U.S. There are today major
installations of fiber to the home in Japan. In the U.S. we are
just talking about getting started, with Verizon in the lead.</div>
<div><b>Internet</b>. Blazing across the cover of the July 15,
2006 issue of<i> CIO</i> is the news that “China Builds a Better
Internet,” which it fleshes out in a cover story on pages 43-45.
China’s Next Generation Internet uses “an emerging communication
standard called Internet protocol version 6 (Ipv6).” This
protocol not only supplies enough address capability to keep up with
burgeoning demand, but it is more secure and efficient than its
predecessors. (Japan and Korea are also launching initiatives in
this area). “China’s Next Generation Internet could further
tighten its control over Internet access and traffic while offering a
strategic advantage in foreign intelligence.” We are advising
companies with logistic networks stretching into China to learn about
the facileness that the Chinese are demonstrating on the Internet.
In fact, it was Chinese clients who forced us to start using the
Internet years ago.</div>
<div><b>Schumpter</b>. When starry eyed business writers are not
raving about Adam Smith’s perpetual significance for Western
economies, they wax purple about <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter"> Joseph
Schumpter’s</a> insight into capitalism. In general, he talks about
capitalism’s gift of creative destruction, where the old is
demolished, so the new can emerge. Schumpter, an Austrian, wound
up at Harvard so you should take him with a few grains of salt.</div>
<div>That dream of fire in the ashes has not happened with
deregulation. We surely have destroyed a lot, but it’s not
clear we have put anything creative or significant in its place.
Phones, the Internet, air transportation, education,
electricity—several parts of our economy are probably in shambles.
Moreover, they should be part of the infrastructure of our next
economy, so it behooves us to get them right. Without them, we
lack the leverage we need in a global economy. Right now we’re
suffering from ‘unbenign neglect.’</div>
<div><b>The Venture Proposition</b>. Smart venture capitalists
always bet on the jockey, rather than the horse. As many have
said to us, they want to know that the guy who is coming to them for
money can quickly go on to a new idea when his old one does not pan
out. An astute regional investor said, “Can they switch?
Because the initial deal is never the right one. Can they
quickly get on a new horse when they’re flagging in the race?”
As Will Rogers said, “If you find yourself in a hole, the
first thing to do is stop digging.’”</div>
<div>That’s the creativity we need now that we have been through
this destructive period of capitalism (a.k.a. ‘restructuring’)
where we tore down the old. As we hit stones in the path, like
Dr. Johnson, or run into brick walls, we must be looking for people
who can cast theory aside and find a course of action that will
work.</div>
<div><b>The Law of Unintended Consequences</b>. <a
href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html"
>This juicy concept</a> can be explained and expanded upon in all
sorts of ways. It sort of means we can take up a course of
action, expecting a benign outcome, but all sorts of other things, we
never visualized, actually come to pass. It can also mean
“things never work out” or “never work out in the way we
expected.” We would say that theories, especially theories
about governance or social change, when some zealot cons society into
taking them seriously, tend to get us in a jam. Economic
theories seem especially pernicious. We would recommend, in this
regard, a look at <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton"> Robert K.
Merton</a>, a.k.a. Meyer R. Schkolnick, who hatched the ‘Law of
Unforeseen Consequences,’ ‘self-fulfilling prophecy,’ and lots
of other aphorisms about how the notions of social scientists mess up
the lives of ordinary mortals. He knew that irony lurks behind
every bush when theory is allowed to become an ideology.</div>
<div>Who would have dreamed that deregulation would lead to monopoly,
high prices, falling quality and inferior technology, eroding global
competitiveness? Who would have dreamed that all parts of the
political spectrum would have fallen for such daft thinking hook,
line, and sinker? But we ourselves took the hook, albeit with
some uneasiness. To re-coin an old phrase apparently not dreamed
up by P.T. Barnum, “There’s a zillion suckers born every
minute.”</div>
<div><b>P.S.</b> There’s a bright libertarian down in Dallas
named Virginia Postrel whose <a
href=
"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684862697/globalprovince/002-5821082-6971250"><i><span
></span>The Future and Its Enemies</i></a> tells us that dynamic
thinkers favor deregulation, which she thinks is part of getting on
with the future, and that static types favor government, regulation,
and all that holds us back. Don’t bank on it. If you
tear up the present and don’t replace it with something more benign,
most likely you will throw us back into the Stone Age. Which
brings us once again to Dr. Johnson’s ‘stone.’</div>
<div><b>P.P.S.</b> Texas is in electricity trouble.
Increased electricity usage, declining reserves, and the elimination
of peak power generators is causing trouble across the U.S.
“The problem is especially acute in Texas because the state has almost
no ability to import power from neighboring states.” In other
words, it suffers from ‘splendid isolation.’ See
“Texas-Size Hunger for Power Worries State’s Grid Boss,”<i> Wall
Street Journal</i>, September 25, 2006, p. A2. State and Federal
safety rules mandate a 12.5% reserve at all times, but it
slipped well under 10% on August 17, far below the 16.3% that had been
projected this summer. Humorously enough, the grid is called the
Electric Reliability Council of Texas, about as appropriate a name as
the Environmental Protection Administration in New York City.</div>
<div>“Californians have held electricity use flat since the 1980s on
a per-capita basis through investments in energy-efficiency and
conservations programs. In 2003, California ranked first among
all states for lowest per-capita electricity use, at 6,732 kilowatt
hours annually. Texas ranked No. 35 with average annual use that
was more than twice as great, at 14,602 kilowatt hours per
person.”</div>
<div>None too soon, Texas is climbing on the wind power bandwagon.
See <a href="http://www.globalprovince.com/bigideas.htm#58update13">
“Texas Blowhard”</a> at Big Ideas.</div>
<div>We suspect there’s a need for developing different rules of
governance for our <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population">
largest states</a>, certainly for California, Texas, New York, and
Florida. They are like little countries, troubled in different
ways because we administer them as if they were like their much
smaller brethren. Kahn, of course, thought the remedy for their
greater complexity was less governance. Their misgovernance has caused
the U.S. economy to lag.</div>
<div><b>P.P.P.S.</b> We have previously said that infrastructure
investment, properly done, constitutes a vast opportunity for the U.S.
in <a href="http://www.globalprovince.com/letters/8-17-05.htm">
“Investment Outlook: Infrastructure.”</a></div>
<div><b>P.P.P.P.S.</b> Remember when you are wailing about the
static influence of state and government, remember that the Internet
achieved lift off in Government at the prompting of DARPA, which, in
prior times, was a force that very much bolstered America’s
competiveness as a byproduct of its activities.</div>
<div><b>P.P.P.P.P.S</b>. If you can shake your free market,
antigovernment bias, reflect on the fact that employment in our
economy is essentially growing in<i> only</i> on sector—healthcare.
Healthcare, of course, is a cancer on the body politic that is simply
eating us alive.</div>
<div>___________________________________________</div>
<div><b>Dunk’s Yardsticks</b></div>
<div><a href="http://www.napm.org/napmreport/pmindex.cfm"><b>
Institute for Supply Management PMI Index</b></a><b><br>
</b>August 2005 - 53.5<br>
August 2006 - 54.5</div>
<div><a href="http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/"><b> National Average of
Gas Prices</b></a><b><br>
</b>September 25, 2005 - $2.778<br>
September 25, 2006 - $2.384</div>
<div><a href="http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MORTG"><b>
30-Yr Fixed Mortgage Rates</b></a><b><br>
</b>August 1, 2005 - 5.82<br>
August 1, 2006 - 6.52</div>
<div><a
href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/H41/default.htm"><b>
Fed's Holdings for Foreign Governments (in Millions)</b></a><br>
September 1, 2005 - $1,468,176<br>
August 31, 2006 - $1,644,798</div>
<div>____________________________________________</div>
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