On trickle-down economics

Anyone who isn’t an acolyte of Reagan, Rand, Hayek or Friedman knows that getting money into circulation is the key: money is the lifeblood of an economy and it needs to be moving around.

My example is to imagine putting $1000 in the pocket of a guy who makes $20k vs one who makes $100k. The former will spend it, or most of it, probably on things he has put off buying or to pay down credit cards, etc. But that money will certainly pass through a lot of hands in a short time. Things will be made or repaired. Food service/restaurants will see some of that. The hardware store or home center will benefit. And the ultimate beneficiaries will be the people working at those places. And they in turn will spend that money…

The other guy will put it in the bank, invest it, or maybe buy a big ticket item, something nonessential. It likely won’t be groceries or home repair or something from Main Street. Maybe a new bauble, most likely of non-US manufacture as so many things are. But not much of it will go into local hands, through dining and tips and the incidental friction of the marketplace.

If there is a simpler, more direct argument for raising wages for the lowest earners, I haven’t heard it.

Underlying opposition to this is the deep and abiding disapproval of someone having an unearned good time. “If we give a bunch of mechanics and shop clerks a bump, they’ll only spend on themselves,” goes the predictable response. See above on money as the lifeblood of an economy.

If business acumen is what’s needed, why not find a real businessman?

We hear a lot about the desirability of business acumen for elected officials, as if the provision of government services is responsive to market forces or has something like a profit motive.

Actually, being a success in business has nothing at all to do with running a responsive government of any size, let alone the world’s largest. But I get tired of hearing about Willard Mitt Romney’s awesomeness at capitalism without any evidence beyond his personal fortune. Capitalism at its best enriches more then just the proprietors and management, by making products or providing services that are cheaper, better, completely new and original or any combination. Sure, getting rich means you did something right but true success means you bettered the lives of your customers and employees, not just you and your investors.

Staples is mentioned as a big win for Romney. At first glance it looks like the idea was WalMart for office supplies, or another iteration of the “Lower Prices. Always.” idea. You’d think a Harvard MBA would realize that’s unsustainable, a variant on the Greater Fool theory: you buy into an unsustainable or short-run idea, hoping to sell out before the truth of it gets out. It’s not a Ponzi scheme or pyramid game, nothing illegal, just one of the twists of the market.

Staples was the first of the big three office supply chains but in looking over the history at Wiki, Romney isn’t even mentioned. His contributions were probably limited to financing and a seat on the board, as his own bio mentions. He lists a lot of other businesses to which he contributed expertise but I don’t see anything that looks imaginative or visionary. He didn’t start a car company to reinvent Detroit, for example, as a hat tip to his father’s legacy.

And there’s the LBO angle, that old notion from the 80s:

Romney soon switched Bain Capital’s focus from startups to the relatively new business of leveraged buyouts: buying existing firms with money mostly borrowed against their assets, partnering with existing management to apply the “Bain way” to their operations (rather than the hostile takeovers practiced in other leverage buyout scenarios), and selling them off in a few years.

So he’s not really a capitalist/entrepreneur but a consultant/financier. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn’t fit the narrative he wants us to buy, of the shrewd businessman. He’s not a team member so much as a team owner who hasn’t faced the risks that true capitalists face on a regular basis.

So I’m not buying the idea of the resolute capitalist so much as an opportunist with a bankroll. I’m sure he’s plenty smart (hey, he went to Harvard, just like our President and many others besides). But smart isn’t necessarily imaginative or creative. He certainly isn’t empathetic, doesn’t connect with the people he aspires to serve. And I have no idea why he wants the job other than to get Obama out of it or that it’s his turn, compensation for his father’s thwarted ambition. I think we’d be well served if we could trade the son for his father, since the son never learned anything from his father’s example.

Income inequality, as seen from space

Last week, I wrote about how urban trees—or the lack thereof—can reveal income inequality. After writing that article, I was curious, could I actually see income inequality from space? It turned out to be easier than I expected..

Herewith, some from my own life:

Where I live now:
Screen Shot 2012-05-24 at 8.26.59 AM.png

Where I lived during my high schools years (left side of the image):

Screen Shot 2012-05-24 at 8.30.47 AM.png

Where we lived when our kids arrived:

Screen Shot 2012-05-24 at 8.39.39 AM.png

I need to look at more of this.

housekeeping

Not that anyone will notice but I had to remove all the old comments (after dumping the database to preserve them). They had become linked to different posts than the ones they had been associated with and no longer made any sense. I suspect I broke all that when I cleared out a raft of automagically-saved drafts and revisions and then — stupidly — renumbered the remaining posts. Hmm, those post numbers must be important…

Goes to show how much attention I have been paying to this almost 10 year old wossname.

private equity firms as rag and bone merchants

While I can agree that some businesses run their useful course and should be allowed to fail, do we really think private equity firms are the ones to make that call?

I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. … The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.

Romney Economics | Mitt Romney’s private sector record.
Romney’s most recent call was to let GM and Chrysler die, rather than invest in them and keep those companies and their networks of suppliers in business. I’d say he’s 0 for 1, as GM seems to be doing well, was never at risk of being nationalized and is back in public hands, with the government retaining a minority stake in hopes of making a little something something. The irony of his father being a successful CEO of long-defunct AMC wasn’t lost: a smarter politician would have found something else to talk about.

Private equity mavens don’t see businesses as businesses or markets as markets: they see everything as a salable asset. You could see that in Romney’s claim that JPMorgan losing $3B meant someone made $3B. Does he really think the economy is a zero-sum game, not a dynamic complex system that expands contracts? Is this the value of a Harvard MBA?

The old saw about the cynic knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing comes to mind. The private equity mindset sees a steel mill as a building, land, and some equipment to be sold off or used up, not as a revenue-generator or the primary income source for families in a town or region. The old school patriarchal capitalists who built towns and schools for their workers, who understood the tension between capital and labor, might not have been so bad in comparison to these rag and bone merchants.

Can anyone cite a business that customer-facing business, a retailer or service provider, that Romney had a hand in creating or managing? Not something funded by Bain or but some evidence that he or his people saw an opportunity and built something to meet it, then ran it successfully.

Maybe we need organizations like Bain to prune the deadwood but I’m not so sure he knows how to decide what needs cutting back. Let’s not allow Romney to spin his experience at breaking things up and selling them off as some kind of visionary leadership.

experiments in IPv6

I have been hearing that a new version of the TCP/IP addressing system is “imminent” since 1994. 18 years later, I have been moved to look into it, to see what it offers or requires. I found more requirements than benefits, some of which are noted below.

The argument is the old addressing scheme doesn’t have enough addresses to go around and it’s design subdivides it inefficiently. There are probably other more technical arguments but those are the reasons more often cites in favor of migrating to it: more address space, less waste. From Wikipedia:

In IPv4 an address consists of 32 bits which limits the address space to 4294967296 (232) possible unique addresses.

You’d think 4 billion addresses would be enough. Maybe so but then some people have been (mis)quoted as claiming the global market for computers was less than 10 or that no one would need a computer in their home. They could not have imagined either the network of today or the devices people use to access it.

IPv6 expands the pool a bit:

Mathematically, the new address space provides the potential for a maximum of 2128, or about 3.403×1038 unique addresses.

I self-host a couple of domains, complete with internet-connected email and web service so this may not apply to a lot of people.

The first thing I needed was access to the IPv6 internet. This doesn’t mean a new ISP so much as either having one that supports it already or using a tunnel service that encapsulates IPv6 packets in innocuous IPv4 packets, allowing them to be unpacked upon receipt. I have CenturyLink (née Qwest) and they don’t do IPv6 yet. So I went with Hurricane Electric and now have free access to services on IPv6. The folks at Hurricane have been doing this for quite some time and have probably answered your questions already. And there is an active forum community as well.

A handful of large public sites offer their content to both varieties — www.ipv6.apple.com, ipv6.google.com, ipv6.cnn.com, to name a couple. Lots of resources in the free/open source software world, as well. Microsoft requires it to be installed in some of its server products, even if you have no plans to use it.

So that’s all good. The equipment here all understands IPv6, from iMacs and MacBooks to a FreeBSD server and a Time Capsule used as a network interface to the ISP we use. So I set up the Time Capsule with the options I got from Hurricane Electric: you’ll need to use an older version of Airport Utility, as of this writing, since 6.0 doesn’t allow access to the IPv6 settings. Their setup page has the options you need for each dialog field:

In your network settings (here’s the Preference Pane in OS X Lion), turn on IPv6 and let it work it’s magic with auto discovery/autoconfig:
Apply those changes and you should be good to go.

To test it, use the Terminal/console app of your choice:

# ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:470:b:839:230:1bff:feaf:42c8 -->; 2001:4860:8005::69
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=0 hlim=55 time=88.143 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=1 hlim=55 time=84.827 ms
^C?--- ipv6.l.google.com ping6 statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 84.827/86.485/88.143/1.658 ms

So you can now ride out on IPv6. Check out the sites listed up top and see if they work. Or try http://ipv6-test.com/ .
But what if you want to host services for an IPv6-enabled public? That’s a little trickier, with some previously undocumented gotchas.