Monday, August 17, 2009
Growthology.org
If you want to contact me, just leave a comment there, or friend me on facebook.
All the best,
Tim
Thursday, January 17, 2008
John Nagl Rides Into the Sunset
Normally this wouldn't be huge news, but John is special and this is a time of war. I met him when I was a sophomore at the AF Academy and he was an exchange cadet from West Point for the semester. As I recall, he wanted to see what life was like in the "Chair Force." I'm pretty sure we smashed Army's football team that fall...[Lt Col John] Nagl, 41, has been one of the Army's most outspoken officers in recent years. (This is a huge point against him, careerwise; the brass look askance at officers, especially those without stars, who draw attention to themselves.) He played a substantial role in drafting the Army's recent field manual on counterinsurgency. His 2002 book, Learning To Eat Soup With a Knife, based on his doctoral dissertation at Oxford (another point against him in some circles), is widely hailed as a seminal book on CI warfare. (It was after reading the book that Gen. David Petraeus asked Nagl to join the panel that produced the field manual.) From 2003-2004, he served as the operations officer of a battalion in Iraq's Anbar province, where he tried to put his ideas into action (and, in the process, became the subject of a 9,200-word New York Times Magazine profile by Peter Maass, titled "Professor Nagl's War").
For most young officers, the question is whether to leave the force after their minimum commitment (5 years) or stay until retirment. Lt. Col. Nagl stayed until retirement, but he obviously could have stayed longer. By retirement, for those who don't know, the military offers a stable defined benefit pension for anyone who serves 20 or more years. So when you hear that someone is a "retired officer" this is what it means. The lingo is similar to the nuances of academic professors, associate profs, assistant profs, adjunt profs, and lecturers.
I think it is unfortunate that John left, and here is why:
Any large professional organization needs a system of promotion to authority, especially one that grows all of its senior talent and never hires in senior staff from the outside. Promotions are based on some combination of talent and seniority. My thesis is that the Army (and military overall) has become exceedingly seniority-based in recent decades, to its detriment. When I left in 1995, the best and worst Lieutenants got promoted to Capatain at exactly the same point in their careers: 4 years to the day after swearing in. What's the incentive to excel? Low. What's the incentive not to make mistakes that lead to firing? Huge. The military culture -- and this is no secret -- is oppressively risk averse.
So why in God's name is a strategic genius like John Nagl - retiring after TWENTY years - leaving as Colonel and not a General? He just didn't wait long enough is the answer, and it's a lousy answer.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Krugman = Dystopian?
The people at Polling Report have a convenient page that, for example, gives you the Gallup results on state of the economy back to the late 1990s. Gallup’s question is subtly different: “How would you rate economic conditions in this country today — as excellent, good, only fair, or poor?”
In the latest poll, only 31% said the economy is either excellent or good; 69% said fair or poor. Responses to the same question taken in 1998 were almost the reverse: 65% or more said excellent or good, around 35% said fair or poor. What’s interesting is that the average unemployment rate in 1998 was 4.5%, basically the same as it is now. So why were people so much happier?
Greenspan Cites the 2007 Index
I was thrilled to see that Greenspan not only knew about the Index (which I co-authored), but supported it and took its ideas to a new level. Since I happened across the section, I realized that historians will read this autobiography centuries from now and track down our book. Looks like the 2007 edition is literally a footnote to history (in a good way!). Kudos to my team at Heritage that put the Index together last year, and especially to the online content team (led by Ted Morgan) that built the website that the Maestro references."There is no direct measure of the impact of cultural mores on economic activity. But a joint venture of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal has in recent years combined statistics from the IMF, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the World Bank to calculate the Index of Economic Freedom for 161 countries. The index combines, among other considerations, the estimated strength and enforcement of property rights, the ease of starting and closing a business, the stability of the currency, the state of labor practices, openness to investment and international trade, freedom from corruption, and the share of the nation;s outputappropriated for public purposes. There is of course a great deal of subjectivity in placing such numbers on such qualitative attributes. But, as best I can judge, their evaluations drawn from the data do seem to square with my more casual observations.
"The index for 2007 lists the United Sates as the most 'free' of the larger economies; ironically Hong Kong, now a part of undemocratic China, is also at the top of the list. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the top seven economies (Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ireland) all have roots in Britain - the home of Adam Smith and the British Enlightenment. But Britishness obviously does not convey a permanent imprint. Zimbabwe, a former British colony (as Southern Rhodesia), ranks almost dead last.""The greater the economic freedom, the greater the scope for business risk and its reward ...."
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Welcome to Dystopia
Every day the newspapers seem to tell us the world is a gloomy place. That post-milennial gloom is in the air. My theory is that people feel the future happening all around them and it's dizzying. We still remember the ways things were in the gentler era (you remember: the good old days when all you had to worry about was nuclear holocaust happening any milisecond?). But the 70s and 80s were a radically different, and quieter, time. Everyone wasn't hyperconnected. You could only watch movies at the theater (remember the lines in 1977?) or on ABC's Sunday Night Special.
We're living in the future. Fair enough, but what has the culture been telling us the future would be? Seems to me, the culture has been pretty clear. "Welcome to Dystoipia!"
Remember the Morlocks? The Time Machine was written by H.G. Wells in 1895, and he anticiapted a future where class warfare had gone genetic by nature.
Aldous Huxley imagined the class division would go genetic thanks to artificial intervention in Brave New World. Well, come to think of it, "I don't want to be a Beta." Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess shows a pretty nasty, empty life for the Cheloveks. And most famously, George Orwell's vision may be the bleakest in 1984, with doublespeak and big brother.
How does that square with our reality, which is reflected by absolute and constant improvement in incomes? I'll return to this question frequently in this blog, and would enjoy your thoughts. I am haunted by the human tendency to pretend things are bad when they are not, mainly because the pretense is an intellectual laziness that turns to the ever-larger central state for solutions. An ever larger state? ... Welcome to Dystopia.