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Andy Grove, one of the big three bosses (along with Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce) of Intel, the company that, more than anybody else, put the silicon in Silicon Valley, has died.
Here is his 2010 op-ed for Bloomberg on rethinking industrial policy for the benefit of American workers:
Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs
July 1, 2010 — 2:00 PM PDTThe underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.
Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.
I am fortunate to have lived through one such example. In 1968 two well-known technologists and their investor friends anted up $3 million to start Intel (INTC), making memory chips for the computer industry. From the beginning we had to figure out how to make our chips in volume. We had to build factories, hire, train, and retain employees, establish relationships with suppliers, and sort out a million other things before Intel could become a billion-dollar company. Three years later the company went public and grew to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. By 1980, 10 years after our IPO, about 13,000 people worked for Intel in the U.S. …
Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975 (figure-B). Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers—factory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL), or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel, and Sony (SNE) (figure-C).
Until a recent spate of suicides at Foxconn’s giant factory complex in Shenzhen, China, few Americans had heard of the company. But most know the products it makes: computers for Dell and HP, Nokia (NOK) cell phones, Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles, Intel motherboards, and countless other familiar gadgets. Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology (STX), and other U.S. tech companies.
You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?
Read the whole thing there.
I suppose if there were a big increase in the number of women programmers and managers, “Silicon Valley” would take on a whole other meaning…
Then people started interviewing tech geeks from Silicon Valley, including the Facebookers, and to a man they all thought this was pure nonsense and never happened---they geeks said they would have been thrilled if such things had happened, but women weren't coding groupies.
That's really all you needed to know about the awful The Social Network: a film purportedly explaining social media couldn't get the lifestyle lived by the nerds in social media, and yet the film's themes were that the nerds' lives (especially Zuckerberg's social outsiderness) heavily influenced how they created social media. Basically, Hollywood is incapable of understanding any world outside it's own---where coked up groupies are in the corner of every mansion and party and office, and drugs and fame fuel falls from grace.
Sorkin really has become insulated from reality. Between The Social Network and The Newsroom, (as well as Studio 60 on Sunset Strip), it's clear he's so immersed in the extreme-left media world that he doesn't actually realize how the world appears and works to anyone not a TV studio exec or a movie producer. He just thinks that a great sketch on SNL will change the entire country's mind and that if only MSNBC ranted more about how great communism is Fox would die and that everyone lives through success like a film actor after his third hit movie. Really bad, insular stuff.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363778
Grove had a small but memorable cameo in Tom Wolfe’s brilliant profile of Robert Noyce, first published in Esquire’s 50th anniversary issue and then updated for Wolfe’s Hooking Up anthology.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363784
Steve, the link is wrong. Here’s the correct link for the original article on Bloomberg’s site:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grove-how-america-can-create-jobs
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363785
Thanks.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363786
“The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.”
I’m sorry, but I immediately began to think of all the Obama ads that portrayed Romney at Bain at doing just this sort of thing: bringing/raising capital for companies that were building factories abroad as well as sending US jobs overseas. If one of the main founders of modern Silicon Valley (two years before Romney announced his candidacy) can state something so obvious and common sense, well, I do hope that the Donald’s campaign managers will read this particular article (“How America can create Jobs”) and stumble upon this relevant paragraph. Seems as though it ought to be on his campaign website somewhere if the rest of the article reads as well as the parts that were posted here.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363796
Trump ought to know about this. Ann Coulter tweeted these economists on Trump’s tariff proposal. They know about this column by Grove. Hopefully Coulter will put them in touch with Trump.
Cruz has copied Trump on immigration, but it will be harder for him, given his donors, to copy Trump on trade. But Trump needs some policy experts to flesh out his ideas on trade.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363798
Grove was the guy who had the insight that entering price wars in the transistor subcategories the (highly protectionist) Japanese already controlled was Sisyphean for global-aspiring rookies like Intel– better to compete in a different game where the cartels couldn’t draw on R&D wealth, i.e. patents. Politically he had seemed to fall on the globalist side, unquestionably more brilliant than most CATO seminar capitalists, yet still “fiscal conservative/social liberal” to put it in the universally recognized euphemism. Just watched Aaron Sorkin’s Jobs movie which, despite frequent snappy-repartee embellishment, was nonetheless accurate about his subject’s 18th century aristocrat-style disdain for the low-wattage grinders, not to mention honesty, human fallibility, fair play, etc… basically a guy who really disliked society as a whole. I think that’s more common in that milieu than the proverbial “evil Trekkie” ideology a la Ben Kingsley’s character in “Sneakers” or the underground diabolical cave-loungers in “Kingsman.” Surprising amount of bitter dudes who hated their own lives succeeding in post-80s tech.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363799
Trump already has some of Senator Sessions’s policy experts working on his campaign so that’s a good start.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363800
The polling data suggests Trump gets killed by Hillary in November:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
Sanders
Clinton
Kasich
Paul Ryan
CruzSo we have Sanders and Clinton losing to Trump, with Sanders doing better. We have any other Republican losing to either Democrat.
They poll assassinations?
Seriously, Mr. Cruz, don't you have anything better to be doing with your time? Like smooching the behinds of the donor class?
The response rates for all types of survey research in this country have been declining steadily and continue to do so now even though they have already reached abysmally low levels. This is a particular problem for political polling. Although these types of pollsters tend to keep technical info, like response rates, close to their chests, I have heard that response rates for this type of polling are now running in the single digits.
One major impact of this is response bias: The very small proportion of those sampled who respond to pollsters is likely to differ in systematic ways from the very large proportion who will not respond. Always remember this when considering poll results.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363804
OT, but CDC is predicting 80% of Puerto Ricans will get Zika…
hashtag #IKnowABoatYouCanGetOn ???
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363808
Given that there was no daylight between Trump and Cruz, Kasich, etc. on Israel at AIPAC, the only issue for the donor class is jobs, trade, and the hollowing out of American industry to the benefit of the donor class and their Kevin Williamson hanger on snob court jesters.
Grove was right, “mass” defined as enough manufacturers and suppliers to quickly and, I hate to say it, Agilely change directions gives China not the us the lead in information technology and electronics. China would dominate even more if it were not for the innate clannishness, short sightedness (“sure, sell poison infant formula and dog food”) and corruption endemic in China.
Ike in “Crusade in Europe” argues persuasively that the WWII American advantage was the mass of industrial companies that could quickly change gears and produce war material. So this has national security implications.
The reason of course that manufacturing went offshore was the Donor Class and specifically the Gentry Liberals. BernieBros … HATE HATE HATE manufacturing, not only for being polluting, messy, smelly, and dirty but giving Joe Sixpack a decent living and the whole point of being a BernieBro is to HATE HATE HATE the White Working Class like Kevin Williamson squared. Yes transitory profits were made financing new factories in China, and yes the lower labor and regulatory costs in China produce more gross Apple revenue for example. As weighed against half the factory’s output at Hon Hai going out the back door in the grey/black market. And huge delays in shipping product across the Pacific Ocean and often across America. And transport costs, not cheap when oil is up. Yes the financial class played a part but the Gentry Liberals purged manufacturing out of Silicon Valley to save the environment or make things nice for them at the expense of Joe Sixpack.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363809
One of the things the Republican party forgot over the last 3 decades is that while they were laying off workers they were also losing their loyalty to corporate America. When someone has a good job they have loyalty to their employer, and if that employer needs subsidies, or tax breaks, or educational partnerships, they will vote more often than not to support that employer. Democrats never forgot to butter the bread of their voters. They’ve been supporting the public unions with ever higher taxes and pensions. And supporting the colleges with public loans for education and and endless supply of students from overseas. Republicans as a whole forgot to do that, and they’re paying the price now.
If corporate America had more people in the mold of Andy Grove, then our tax and spending would be a lot healthier. And the execs could be sitting on top of a growing pyramid, rather than fighting a rear-guard action to preserve more of their shrinking empires.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363810
As Steve has pointed out in other instances:
What’s the strangely missing word from this article? Something like imm… immig….immigran…
I wonder if Orban’s wall will have an exit door?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363814
Yes, this is an old concept and is standard Keynesianism: trade deficits are a “demand leakage”. Aggregate demand leaks out of the country with trade deficits, and thus declines in the domestic economy, resulting in economic decline. This was economic orthodoxy until Reagan. The wealthy didn’t like this because they live off of moneylending, and ordinary people had too much of aggregate demand, which lead to wage and price inflation for the work and goods that ordinary people produced and reduced the value of the wealthy’s moneylending – the value of their loans.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363823
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
Of course the polls show that, now. Cruz and Kasich supporters see Trump as the enemy right now. They are lying because they want to be able to point to polls showing that their candidate is stronger than Trump. Those emotions will settle down and in a year they will be rabid Trump supporters (unless someone else is nominated, in which case they will love that person).
Going by common sense and a grasp of human nature, I think that electoral potency goes something like this:
Trump (highest)
Sanders
Clinton
Kasich
Paul Ryan
Cruz
So we have Sanders and Clinton losing to Trump, with Sanders doing better. We have any other Republican losing to either Democrat.
There are many months left to go, and this election and the polls will undoubtedly change, but at this point the polls suggest Trump losing pretty badly.
A reality check. What is a pleasant wish that you have is not common sense. Most voters have an unfavorable impression of Trump. Primary voters are small part of the electorate and Trump can't even win a majority of Republican primary voters. He is doomed.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363829
Grove was a big proponent of voc-ed as well. He seamed grounded in reality:
http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/entrepreneurship/interview_with_andrew_grove
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363839
My favorite garage startup story is Ruger.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363840
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
The reductio in this case being that the polling data sucks wad.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363841
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
“The polling data suggests Trump gets killed by Hillary in November:”
They poll assassinations?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363855
The problem with this message of Grove’s is a lot of his target audience (the people who need to “get it”) are lawyers and related types, such as those who majored in Political Science of Finance. We need a few less of these people in positions of power and a few more with backgrounds in things like engineering. (The Chinese have a lot of engineers in high places.)
Trump’s no engineer, but he might have seen some Civil Engineering in passing. Every little bit helps.
Hum, about those “who is Trump?” games… Gorbachev and his wife were lawyers. But Boris Yeltsin:
So it took the coarse gruff guy in charge of the sewerage and plumbing to see the need and take corrective action, no doubt with the help of a lot of people who had complained about such things,
Donald Trump, the American Boris Yeltsin of our current time.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363859
Sanders
Clinton
Kasich
Paul Ryan
CruzSo we have Sanders and Clinton losing to Trump, with Sanders doing better. We have any other Republican losing to either Democrat.
So the polling data is wrong because Cruz and Kasich supporters are lying? The same data shows Cruz and Kasich losing to Bernie. Your comment makes no sense.
There are many months left to go, and this election and the polls will undoubtedly change, but at this point the polls suggest Trump losing pretty badly.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363867
Would it make sense to just ban automation outright to save jobs? I am thinking of human quotas. And McDonald’s and Wendy’s will have no choice but to comply if they want to continue to exist as a going concern here.
We simply wouldn't have a problem at all without mass immigration. Western populations were higher than they needed to be as IR manufacturing needed masses of workers but hitech didn't so the low birth rates would have fixed the problem.
Zero mass immigration from the 1960s combined with increasing tech we'd be in clover now - 1950s sci fi for realz.
Japan at least might get that life if they hold out on immigration. There'll be a bulge of elderly to manage but after they get through that bulge they'll be living in Arcadia (at least practically speaking) - lots of personal space, cheap housing etc.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363871
Astounding. Is that more, or less, true now? And how topical that statistic is—I hope Trump has eyes on ISteve.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363876
And as for the people can just be artists stuff if they get thrown out of work, 99% of people have zero artistic talent beyond drawing stick figures, so that is a nonstarter.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363878
I do like seeing how that one anonymous person keeps pretending to be different people.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363879
Andy Grove was also one of the many brilliant and high achieving Hungarian Jews of the 20th century.
If there was ever a group in the modern age to be studied to find any genes and IQ connection it’s Hungarian Jews.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363880
If there was ever a group in the modern age to be studied to find any genes and IQ connection it's Hungarian Jews.
There were three historic physicists in school together in Budapest.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363882
Immigration related:
A study on the effects of European ancestry in the Americas:
John Fuerst and Emil Kirkegaard. Admixture in the Americas: Regional and National Differences. MANKIND QUARTERLY 2016 56:3 256
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298214364_Admixture_in_the_Americas_Regional_and_National_Differences
James Thompson comments:
And here’s Thompson’s response to an obvious question:
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2016/03/admixture-in-americas-european.html
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363886
Didn’t William Shockley do more to create Silicon Valley than anyone else? Of course, his race-realist views have made him a non-person, despite his winning the Nobel prize in 1956.
Grove and the others are Shockley’s heirs.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363897
If there was ever a group in the modern age to be studied to find any genes and IQ connection it's Hungarian Jews.
Sincerely, that is amazing to see a Jew with White American interests at heart. His linked article encapsulates the plight of the middle-to-lower class White West.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363899
“Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs”, Andy Grove, Bloomberg Business, Jun-1 2010:
What high-value US work? Choosing the color of the tail-fins? Writing the sales contracts? Managing a Radio Shack (joke)?
But not at destroying them, we’ve got that part down pretty good. And keeping it out of the papers.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363910
Grove and the others are Shockley's heirs.
Noyce and Moore worked directly for Shockley and famously quit to get out from under him.
Another claimant to the title of Father of Silicon Valley was Shockley’s friend, Stanford dean of engineering Fred Terman, the mentor of Hewlett and Packard. He was the son of Lewis Terman, creator of America’s first IQ test, the Stanford-Binet.
Other Nobelists tended to agree with Linus Pauling that "The old-fashioned way is best."
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363911
It was a perfect storm…
Another one of the “fathers of silicon valley” is, of all people, Charles Lindberg:
NASA Ames Research Center:
A lot of companies grew up around Moffett. Fairchild Semiconductor was right across the highway from Moffett. Military avionics and radars needed chips and all that. The area is the heart of silicon valley.
NACA, which later became NASA, had an aviation research facility on the East coast (Langley) and Ames (Moffett) on the West coast.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363931
Grove was old school tech – IOW very smart. His views are sadly the exception in Silicon Valley today where support of off-shoring and open borders the norm. IMS Noyce before he died was trying to lead a SV initiative to bring back some of the tech industry that already left for Asia, at the he was met with a lot apathy and some derision.
A bit of that story can be found Tom Wolfe’s book that talks about Noyce.
I do hope someone gets the Bloomberg article to Trump or his advisers.
You know it’s sad, I’m old enough to remember companies like Micropolis, Symbolics and Seagate having shops in Northridge back in the 80′s. Rockwell was just a short drive away. Lockheed Skunk Works was in Valencia. There were a raft of smaller companies like MDE and Space Labs who actually designed and built medical equipment in the Valley. In North Hollywood HP had a big presence. It was a great time to be in technology, jobs were plentiful.
It would be nice to see some of that come back. I know if it does, it won’t come to Los Angeles or even California, that’s out of the question. The Democrats are quite against industry of any sort.
I thought it was a part of their Burbank facility. The airport was originally theirs until the city got it. The biggest employer of computer/aerospace/high tech in the valley was Litton Industries. They had a few facilities besides their big one in Woodland Hills.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363933
Yes, HP had a highrise on Lankershim in North Hollywood back then. It’s all entertainment industry now.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363936
Shockley could have been a Father of Silicon Valley in another sense, as he contributed to Robert Graham’s notorious Repository for Germinal Choice. But, pardon the expression, nothing came of it. Or no one.
Other Nobelists tended to agree with Linus Pauling that “The old-fashioned way is best.”
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363940
Another one of the "fathers of silicon valley" is, of all people, Charles Lindberg:
NASA Ames Research Center:A lot of companies grew up around Moffett. Fairchild Semiconductor was right across the highway from Moffett. Military avionics and radars needed chips and all that. The area is the heart of silicon valley.
NACA, which later became NASA, had an aviation research facility on the East coast (Langley) and Ames (Moffett) on the West coast.
NASA couldn’t spell “Lindbergh”?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363941
When the craptastic film The Social Network came out, the reviewers noted that the writer (Aaron Sorkin) and director (David Fincher) had created scenes where the tech geeks in Silicon Valley had groupies hanging around the offices and mansions doing coke and acting like stereotypical movie groupies–thus leading to the inevitable coked out-groupied-out leaders having fallings out.
Then people started interviewing tech geeks from Silicon Valley, including the Facebookers, and to a man they all thought this was pure nonsense and never happened—they geeks said they would have been thrilled if such things had happened, but women weren’t coding groupies.
That’s really all you needed to know about the awful The Social Network: a film purportedly explaining social media couldn’t get the lifestyle lived by the nerds in social media, and yet the film’s themes were that the nerds’ lives (especially Zuckerberg’s social outsiderness) heavily influenced how they created social media. Basically, Hollywood is incapable of understanding any world outside it’s own—where coked up groupies are in the corner of every mansion and party and office, and drugs and fame fuel falls from grace.
Sorkin really has become insulated from reality. Between The Social Network and The Newsroom, (as well as Studio 60 on Sunset Strip), it’s clear he’s so immersed in the extreme-left media world that he doesn’t actually realize how the world appears and works to anyone not a TV studio exec or a movie producer. He just thinks that a great sketch on SNL will change the entire country’s mind and that if only MSNBC ranted more about how great communism is Fox would die and that everyone lives through success like a film actor after his third hit movie. Really bad, insular stuff.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363943
No, it wouldn’t make sense to ban automation (with the exception of leaf blowers, which are a blight on our world and could more peacefully be replaced by rakes and brooms).
I hail Ryobi and Ozito each summer.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363944
You are confusing silicon with silicone.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363947
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
Once Trump trains his guns on Hillary, I suspect it will be a similar story to the nomination.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363952
You’ve obviously never had to prepare your roof for the coming summer’s fire threat.
I hail Ryobi and Ozito each summer.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363956
Then how do you solve technological unemployment genius?
https://youtu.be/t8qo7pzH_NM
Then you could implement a scaled tariff to bring more production back to the US.
Finally, you could use some of the productivity gains from automation to reduce the need for people to work. Didn’t Keynes predict work weeks would drop to 15 hours? Maybe consider paying people so they don’t have to work (see below).
Of course, if you’re going to do that, you’d want to limit population growth so the pie doesn’t have to be sliced too small. But you’d still need some smarties to handle the robots. So maybe you structure incentives so smart folks have more kids and everyone else has fewer kids.
https://youtu.be/t8qo7pzH_NM
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363961
OT:
Steve, I like your golf course photo with “STEVE SAILER” across the top that sits at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. Is it new?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363967
Steve, I like your golf course photo with "STEVE SAILER" across the top that sits at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. Is it new?
One of my readers made it for me a couple of years ago. We were talking about using it as a banner for iSteve, but then the Unz Review happened, so I didn’t use it. But it’s too nice to waste so I put it down in the right column for the edification of anybody who reads a lot of posts at once.
It’s the third hole at Torrey Pines South in La Jolla, CA. It’s a par 3 “Redan” hole created by Rees Jones, where you don’t actually have to fly the ball all the way over the canyon to the pin. You can land it short right on the hill and have it roll down to the hole.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363971
Sanders
Clinton
Kasich
Paul Ryan
CruzSo we have Sanders and Clinton losing to Trump, with Sanders doing better. We have any other Republican losing to either Democrat.
“going by common sense”
A reality check. What is a pleasant wish that you have is not common sense. Most voters have an unfavorable impression of Trump. Primary voters are small part of the electorate and Trump can’t even win a majority of Republican primary voters. He is doomed.
Neither polls nor pundits predicted Trump's success so far, it is a bit much to expect them to accurately reflect his prospects of becoming president as the official Republican candidate with a clear run.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1363990
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
The obligatory anonymous concern troll on each thread which might in some way have a tenuous link to Trump returns.
Seriously, Mr. Cruz, don’t you have anything better to be doing with your time? Like smooching the behinds of the donor class?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364014
A reality check. What is a pleasant wish that you have is not common sense. Most voters have an unfavorable impression of Trump. Primary voters are small part of the electorate and Trump can't even win a majority of Republican primary voters. He is doomed.
In your (mythical) majoritarian electoral democracy he can’t win. No need for a third party spoiler candidate to be run against Trump.
Neither polls nor pundits predicted Trump’s success so far, it is a bit much to expect them to accurately reflect his prospects of becoming president as the official Republican candidate with a clear run.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364024
You could start by enforcing current immigration laws and restricting new immigration to shrink the labor market.
Then you could implement a scaled tariff to bring more production back to the US.
Finally, you could use some of the productivity gains from automation to reduce the need for people to work. Didn’t Keynes predict work weeks would drop to 15 hours? Maybe consider paying people so they don’t have to work (see below).
Of course, if you’re going to do that, you’d want to limit population growth so the pie doesn’t have to be sliced too small. But you’d still need some smarties to handle the robots. So maybe you structure incentives so smart folks have more kids and everyone else has fewer kids.
That said, if we look at the people who currently have a guaranteed basic income - those on welfare, it doesn't look too promising. I haven't noticed much entrepreneurial spirit in the welfare crowd I've dealt with, unless the guy that used to try to sell me oxycontin at the gas station all the time counts. For that matter, they're not creating works of art or literature, or getting together to improve their communities either. With all that free time they just kind of do... nothing.
Basically, I'm concerned that the people who have it in them to start a company find a way to do it in our current imperfect system, and putting more people on the dole would cause the moral and cultural degradation we see in the welfare class now to become more widespread.
FWIW, I think we are likely on the path to a UBI anyways, because it's a natural outcome of the widening IQ gap and increasing automation. I hope we can find a way to incentivize productivity in absence of fear of poverty. Also, how much of a productivity increase would the private sector need to see to make such a thing feasible? Basic income for 350 million people is a whole lot of tax dollars.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364031
You could start by enforcing current immigration laws and restricting new immigration to shrink the labor market.
Then you could implement a scaled tariff to bring more production back to the US.
Finally, you could use some of the productivity gains from automation to reduce the need for people to work. Didn’t Keynes predict work weeks would drop to 15 hours? Maybe consider paying people so they don’t have to work (see below).
Of course, if you’re going to do that, you’d want to limit population growth so the pie doesn’t have to be sliced too small. But you’d still need some smarties to handle the robots. So maybe you structure incentives so smart folks have more kids and everyone else has fewer kids.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364033
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
Interesting way to put it when you consider how many people around her have died mysterious deaths over the years.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364041
The problem with Jews is that even when secular they still advocate policies which result in the destruction of White people, look at Ron Unz and his advocacy for flooding the US eduation sector with Asians, whcih would only result in Gentile Whites getting kicked out, or his advocacy for mass Asian immigration into white countries if you try to expand his logic into immigration policy.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364052
That’s a nice piece, Steve. I have to hand it to Grove, a tech titan with foresight, a conscience, and some gratitude for the country that allowed him to be as successful as he was.
There should be some opprobrium for companies that carry through labor savings to the nth degree, e.g. with self-checkout at supermarkets and the like. There should be some sort of balance attainable I would think. I didn’t have children just so robots could make them obsolete.
It also seems that when the elite of (white) nations that choose to maintain a small group of ultra-wealthy and kill off their lower and middle class ethnic kin will be risking a takeover by immigration and warfare of other peoples who don’t choose to kill off their masses. Quantity has a quality all of its own, and all.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364111
You’re right. But wasn’t it even a little bit fun?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364112
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries
It seems that chip wafer fab is not a low labor cost operation anyway, so it is not likely for chip fab sites to be located in China. If a chip fab site is located in Germany, Ireland, or Singapore then wages there is not likely to be a lot lower than the US. Intel is not in the cost profile of manufacturing as Apple or Nokia. And Intel is highly overrated IMO, AMD chips are more economical more each dollar spent.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364151
You want to avoid anything that reduces productivity as productivity is the only source of prosperity.
We simply wouldn’t have a problem at all without mass immigration. Western populations were higher than they needed to be as IR manufacturing needed masses of workers but hitech didn’t so the low birth rates would have fixed the problem.
Zero mass immigration from the 1960s combined with increasing tech we’d be in clover now – 1950s sci fi for realz.
Japan at least might get that life if they hold out on immigration. There’ll be a bulge of elderly to manage but after they get through that bulge they’ll be living in Arcadia (at least practically speaking) – lots of personal space, cheap housing etc.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364185
This is well-said by Grove. It summarizes where we are headed.
But he also says,
But that is the problem. The American (and European) middle class can never compete against a labor market comprising billions of desperate, un-free people willing to work for peanuts.
Either the Western World protects its masses from Asian labor competition, or its people will become just as poor and un-free as their counterparts in Asia.
I say again and again, this is the single worst problem facing us.
Even Ricardo, who harped on a division of labor where each country does what it's best suited to do, followed up his examples with an explanation that he assumes that capital is not free to travel all over the world, that various factors including loyalty would make businessmen invest in their respective countries with the exception of things specific to certain areas (mercury mines etc). That part gets left out whenever anyone quotes Ricardo on comparative advantage. Again, James Goldsmith was a visionary in these times of virtuous blindness for simply stating that 1+1=2 and when capital and technology can make nearly identical products anywhere, a race to the lowest labor cost regions (caeteris paribus) is sure to follow.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364192
“Not gonna happen anymore, folks. Not gonna happen. Apple will be making iphones here in America for a change. ” Go Trump! Let’s face it, the guy is a genius.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364203
Again as I said chip fab work is a high wage capital intensive high skilled work, notice that the alternative locations to the US are Germany, Ireland, and Singapore, if low wages for the production of chips were so important like in the manufacture of IPads then the chip fabs would have been located in the Philippines or Vietnam, not Singapore.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364206
Andy’s Bloomberg piece reads nicely, but how come he never pushed to implement this logic whilst he was CEO? what is it that so many businessmen and politicians see the light once they are in retirement, but not whilst they are in office?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364208
Grove was right, "mass" defined as enough manufacturers and suppliers to quickly and, I hate to say it, Agilely change directions gives China not the us the lead in information technology and electronics. China would dominate even more if it were not for the innate clannishness, short sightedness ("sure, sell poison infant formula and dog food") and corruption endemic in China.
Ike in "Crusade in Europe" argues persuasively that the WWII American advantage was the mass of industrial companies that could quickly change gears and produce war material. So this has national security implications.
The reason of course that manufacturing went offshore was the Donor Class and specifically the Gentry Liberals. BernieBros ... HATE HATE HATE manufacturing, not only for being polluting, messy, smelly, and dirty but giving Joe Sixpack a decent living and the whole point of being a BernieBro is to HATE HATE HATE the White Working Class like Kevin Williamson squared. Yes transitory profits were made financing new factories in China, and yes the lower labor and regulatory costs in China produce more gross Apple revenue for example. As weighed against half the factory's output at Hon Hai going out the back door in the grey/black market. And huge delays in shipping product across the Pacific Ocean and often across America. And transport costs, not cheap when oil is up. Yes the financial class played a part but the Gentry Liberals purged manufacturing out of Silicon Valley to save the environment or make things nice for them at the expense of Joe Sixpack.
Robert Navarro explores this very issue, among others, in his new book, Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World. For an excellent discussion of the book by the author and other U.S. and U.K. military experts on C-Span go here: http://goo.gl/9lBMYa
Of course this is one of Trump’s arguments also: it’s not just about jobs but about America’s military preparedness. And, as Trump says, we still hold all the cards because China depends on free access to the American market. If Trump wins the nomination the fall election will be a referendum not just on immigration but on trade as well. The American people will finally have a choice. We’ll see how much common sense they have.
America has been sleeping while its industrial riches have been stolen.
Let's hope the sleeping giant awakes.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364212
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh16gen.htm
It also suggests that Bernie beats Trump even more badly and beats the other Republicans as well. While Cruz and Kasich do well against Hillary, with Kasich beating her handily.
Clickbait from a troll. But it does give me an opportunity to point something out.
The response rates for all types of survey research in this country have been declining steadily and continue to do so now even though they have already reached abysmally low levels. This is a particular problem for political polling. Although these types of pollsters tend to keep technical info, like response rates, close to their chests, I have heard that response rates for this type of polling are now running in the single digits.
One major impact of this is response bias: The very small proportion of those sampled who respond to pollsters is likely to differ in systematic ways from the very large proportion who will not respond. Always remember this when considering poll results.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364229
I'm sorry, but I immediately began to think of all the Obama ads that portrayed Romney at Bain at doing just this sort of thing: bringing/raising capital for companies that were building factories abroad as well as sending US jobs overseas. If one of the main founders of modern Silicon Valley (two years before Romney announced his candidacy) can state something so obvious and common sense, well, I do hope that the Donald's campaign managers will read this particular article ("How America can create Jobs") and stumble upon this relevant paragraph. Seems as though it ought to be on his campaign website somewhere if the rest of the article reads as well as the parts that were posted here.
14 years and 8 months later. The can has been successfully kicked down the road. 14 more years of industrial and financial inertia since this article, Three whole bubbles burst and another one coming to bursting strength this fall. Yeah he was really onto something wasn’t he.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364235
Seriously, Mr. Cruz, don't you have anything better to be doing with your time? Like smooching the behinds of the donor class?
This is actually the first time I’ve looked at the general election polling data. I was surprised at how badly Trump does. These polls are update every couple of weeks or so, and if this recent terror attack doesn’t produce a decent bump for Trump, it won’t be looking very good for Trump’s prospects in the fall.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364236
This is exactly right. His long-standing position on trade is the single, biggest reason I support Trump. I think he has brought this problem to prominence as he did with immigration.
America has been sleeping while its industrial riches have been stolen.
Let’s hope the sleeping giant awakes.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364265
More, Intel recently halted construction on at least one US fab.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364266
If Andy Grove is/was so much against outsourcing American industry, how come Intel built so many fabrication factories abroad? In Costa Rica and Malaysia and China, etc. The fabs in Costa Rica (now closed and moved to China) and Malaysia date to Grove’s time as CEO.
The process could only be fought politically but at the time only a few people (Goldsmith, Perot) were warning what would happen while on the other side you had the entire media.
It's only now that what Goldsmith and Perot warned about has become true that there's a chance again.
nb it's not just the US either; the current version of "race to the bottom" globalization traps everyone in a slow death spiral.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364278
Wow. I just read that essay yesterday after seeing the link in a recent comment thread. That guy had one helluva life.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364300
Neither polls nor pundits predicted Trump's success so far, it is a bit much to expect them to accurately reflect his prospects of becoming president as the official Republican candidate with a clear run.
The polls have been predicting Trump’s successes in the primaries so far. The pundits have not.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364429
Then people started interviewing tech geeks from Silicon Valley, including the Facebookers, and to a man they all thought this was pure nonsense and never happened---they geeks said they would have been thrilled if such things had happened, but women weren't coding groupies.
That's really all you needed to know about the awful The Social Network: a film purportedly explaining social media couldn't get the lifestyle lived by the nerds in social media, and yet the film's themes were that the nerds' lives (especially Zuckerberg's social outsiderness) heavily influenced how they created social media. Basically, Hollywood is incapable of understanding any world outside it's own---where coked up groupies are in the corner of every mansion and party and office, and drugs and fame fuel falls from grace.
Sorkin really has become insulated from reality. Between The Social Network and The Newsroom, (as well as Studio 60 on Sunset Strip), it's clear he's so immersed in the extreme-left media world that he doesn't actually realize how the world appears and works to anyone not a TV studio exec or a movie producer. He just thinks that a great sketch on SNL will change the entire country's mind and that if only MSNBC ranted more about how great communism is Fox would die and that everyone lives through success like a film actor after his third hit movie. Really bad, insular stuff.
I was pretty sure I did not want to watch The Social Network but now I am sure. Coding groupies, my butt.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364527
There should be some opprobrium for companies that carry through labor savings to the nth degree, e.g. with self-checkout at supermarkets and the like. There should be some sort of balance attainable I would think. I didn't have children just so robots could make them obsolete.
It also seems that when the elite of (white) nations that choose to maintain a small group of ultra-wealthy and kill off their lower and middle class ethnic kin will be risking a takeover by immigration and warfare of other peoples who don't choose to kill off their masses. Quantity has a quality all of its own, and all.
I like technology, but I despise self-checkout. “Unknown item in bagging area.” “Please wait for assistance”.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364528
https://youtu.be/t8qo7pzH_NM
The futurist community seems to have enthusiastically embraced the idea of a universal basic income. A lot of them point to the risk inherent in startups and believe that if people didn’t have to worry about going broke in the event of failure, we’d see more startups. I see their point and they may be right. Hell, I’ve been sitting on something I’d like to try for lack of time and cashflow myself.
That said, if we look at the people who currently have a guaranteed basic income – those on welfare, it doesn’t look too promising. I haven’t noticed much entrepreneurial spirit in the welfare crowd I’ve dealt with, unless the guy that used to try to sell me oxycontin at the gas station all the time counts. For that matter, they’re not creating works of art or literature, or getting together to improve their communities either. With all that free time they just kind of do… nothing.
Basically, I’m concerned that the people who have it in them to start a company find a way to do it in our current imperfect system, and putting more people on the dole would cause the moral and cultural degradation we see in the welfare class now to become more widespread.
FWIW, I think we are likely on the path to a UBI anyways, because it’s a natural outcome of the widening IQ gap and increasing automation. I hope we can find a way to incentivize productivity in absence of fear of poverty. Also, how much of a productivity increase would the private sector need to see to make such a thing feasible? Basic income for 350 million people is a whole lot of tax dollars.
The interesting thing about Wenger is he is clearly a very bright guy (PhD in computer science from MIT, former startup CEO, current venture capitalist) but he hasn't yet accepted the logical implication of his basic income with respect to immigration (i.e., that you'll have to restrict it).
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364597
Well…
Another successful American Jew getting praised by antisemites
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364648
There are many months left to go, and this election and the polls will undoubtedly change, but at this point the polls suggest Trump losing pretty badly.
Voters, during contentious, politically-correct campaigns, have been horrendous liars to poll takers in both the US and EU for the past few election cycles. Labor was crushed to death in the UK, while polling was telling Tories to start packing up their offices. The results shocked everyone. Labor was routed. UKIP wasn’t even on the radar in polling, but finished Election Day with millions of votes, and are positioned to finish off labor next year. Any objective political scientist using predictive formulae not dependent on push polling; fraudulent, targeted polling; and notorious, transparent lying by poll respondents will conclude that Trump is well ahead of Hillary. Calculated probability of a Trump victory, by one scientist using accurate, arcane mathematics? 97-99% https://www.sbstatesman.com/2016/02/23/political-science-professor-forecasts-trump-as-general-election-winner/
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364703
Another successful American Jew getting praised by antisemites
Damn. Excuse me for not giving (((Andy Grove))) his due. I think it was me who started the trend of positive acknowledgement though.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364787
And our prevailing ideologies, especially the sacrosanct relics of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries like free trade and comparative advantage and specialization, are not really suited to the new realities on the ground.
Even Ricardo, who harped on a division of labor where each country does what it’s best suited to do, followed up his examples with an explanation that he assumes that capital is not free to travel all over the world, that various factors including loyalty would make businessmen invest in their respective countries with the exception of things specific to certain areas (mercury mines etc). That part gets left out whenever anyone quotes Ricardo on comparative advantage. Again, James Goldsmith was a visionary in these times of virtuous blindness for simply stating that 1+1=2 and when capital and technology can make nearly identical products anywhere, a race to the lowest labor cost regions (caeteris paribus) is sure to follow.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364820
That said, if we look at the people who currently have a guaranteed basic income - those on welfare, it doesn't look too promising. I haven't noticed much entrepreneurial spirit in the welfare crowd I've dealt with, unless the guy that used to try to sell me oxycontin at the gas station all the time counts. For that matter, they're not creating works of art or literature, or getting together to improve their communities either. With all that free time they just kind of do... nothing.
Basically, I'm concerned that the people who have it in them to start a company find a way to do it in our current imperfect system, and putting more people on the dole would cause the moral and cultural degradation we see in the welfare class now to become more widespread.
FWIW, I think we are likely on the path to a UBI anyways, because it's a natural outcome of the widening IQ gap and increasing automation. I hope we can find a way to incentivize productivity in absence of fear of poverty. Also, how much of a productivity increase would the private sector need to see to make such a thing feasible? Basic income for 350 million people is a whole lot of tax dollars.
Welfare is not a guaranteed annual income. If you get a job you lose your welfare; an extremely high marginal tax rate. Whereas if you have a guaranteed income, a job simply adds to your overall income. The problem with a guaranteed income is not that it will lead to layabouts. The problem is that it will attract immigrants. We can’t have a guaranteed annual income until we have a great reduction in immigration.
Steve has written about how immigration amounts to a stock dilution scam run by the elites. The elites enrich themselves by increasing the number of shares, which decreases the value held by ordinary citizens. A guaranteed annual income, that is a citizen's dividend, makes this much more explicit and clear to ordinary citizens. Ordinary citizens would immediately recognize that immigration is a stock dilution scam that threatens their dividends.
I don't have enough faith in human nature to believe that a much larger segment of the population that has just enough dignity not to abuse the welfare system right now wouldn't do so if what little stigma remains were removed.
If the system were tested somewhere and that was found to be a small or nonexistent problem then I'd be happy to be proved wrong. And like I said, I think it's likely we'll move to a UBI regardless of possible negative effects, and it's definitely preferable to the kind of unrest we'd be likely to see if we stay on our current path of widening income inequality.
I agree 100% that the immigrant draw would be catastrophic.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364824
When I was finishing my MBA in 2000 at the University of Florida, Intel flew me out to San Diego on three separate occasions for a series of job interviews. It was looking like a job offer was forthcoming and I even scouted out a couple of apartments, but no offer ever came. One attractive benefit of working at Intel, at that time, was a twelve-week paid sabbatical after seven years on the job and every seven years thereafter.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364869
Sanders
Clinton
Kasich
Paul Ryan
CruzSo we have Sanders and Clinton losing to Trump, with Sanders doing better. We have any other Republican losing to either Democrat.
Your disdain for those who are Christian and/or conservative blinds you to the fact that there are a lot of us and makes you put Cruz last.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364897
Lockheed Skunk Works was in Valencia
I thought it was a part of their Burbank facility. The airport was originally theirs until the city got it. The biggest employer of computer/aerospace/high tech in the valley was Litton Industries. They had a few facilities besides their big one in Woodland Hills.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364910
There have to be some jobs for “assisters.”
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364915
Intel owes it’s existence to IBM for selecting the 8088 as it’s main processor for the PC when Intel was on it’s deathbed. IBM took a 25% stake in Intel but forced them into the second source contract with AMD in order to guarantee they would have product. Intel tried many times to get around that contract once they no longer needed it similar to the way Microsoft used it’s operating system to screw real innovative companies like Borland, Lotus, and Ashton-Tate (Dbase).
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1364919
Think about the guaranteed annual income as an annual dividend payment paid out to citizens for owning a share of citizenship. A citizen’s dividend.
Steve has written about how immigration amounts to a stock dilution scam run by the elites. The elites enrich themselves by increasing the number of shares, which decreases the value held by ordinary citizens. A guaranteed annual income, that is a citizen’s dividend, makes this much more explicit and clear to ordinary citizens. Ordinary citizens would immediately recognize that immigration is a stock dilution scam that threatens their dividends.
Also, how is the UBI supposed to be funded? The federal budget outlay in the 2016 budget submission is $4 trillion, but a basic income of just $30,000 for every adult citizen of the US would be over $7 trillion.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365021
Grove was CEO when Intel offshored its chip assembly and test operations to Costa Rica and Malaysia. He was also CEO when they built a large chip fab in Israel, which was (and still is, I think) subsidized by American taxpayers (through the Israeli government).
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365120
There are many months left to go, and this election and the polls will undoubtedly change, but at this point the polls suggest Trump losing pretty badly.
Another thing that makes some skeptical here, is that the polling data fails to do a state by state analysis as to where Hillary would beat Trump handily.
FACT: Mitt Romney carried the South handily vs Obama (barring a few states). He received 206 electoral votes in the election. That is not a landslide loss. Trump is certain to receive at least that much as a basis of which to campaign. Other polls, that are state by state comparison have shown Trump either beating Hillary or drawing near even in states like NY; PA; OH; and MI. MSM, including the NYT have made mention of these state by state internal polls of Trump doing well vs Hillary in November.
ALSO: It stands to reason. IF Cruz and suddenly now Kasich (who has been a virtual nonentity thoughout the primary season) were able to beat Hillary or do vastly better than Trump, then it would also stand to reason that they’d be handily beating Trump as well in the primaries/caucuses. But that’s not what’s happening.
To use a loose NCAA analogy, you can’t actually get to the finals or the big dance in November until you first punch your ticket in the semifinals. Kasich has won a single primary (same as Rubio) and Cruz has won most of the Mt./Plains region and that is all. Most of the GOP primaries are voting handily for Trump. And as more candidates drop out, his share of the total GOP primary vote is increasing. If he were so awful, he wouldn’t be winning and heading toward becoming the GOP’s likely nominee.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365155
I understand the difference. My point is that we have a large sample size of people who have all the free time in the world and don’t do anything with it except sit around and watch tv. I realize that they might not want a job because they’ll lose their welfare, but I’m not only talking about jobs. They don’t do anything. Have you ever lived somewhere with a large percentage of the population on the dole? It’s utterly soul-crushing. People need work to have dignity.
I don’t have enough faith in human nature to believe that a much larger segment of the population that has just enough dignity not to abuse the welfare system right now wouldn’t do so if what little stigma remains were removed.
If the system were tested somewhere and that was found to be a small or nonexistent problem then I’d be happy to be proved wrong. And like I said, I think it’s likely we’ll move to a UBI regardless of possible negative effects, and it’s definitely preferable to the kind of unrest we’d be likely to see if we stay on our current path of widening income inequality.
I agree 100% that the immigrant draw would be catastrophic.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365204
“…That part gets left out whenever anyone quotes Ricardo on comparative advantage. Again, James Goldsmith was a visionary in these times of virtuous blindness for simply stating that 1+1=2 and when capital and technology can make nearly identical products anywhere, a race to the lowest labor cost regions (caeteris paribus) is sure to follow.”
You can build a modern fab anywhere (though it helps if power is reliable and cheap). But sheep and wine (certainly centuries ago) have places where they do best.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365213
“…chip fab work is a high wage capital intensive high skilled work, notice that the alternative locations to the US are Germany, Ireland, and Singapore, if low wages for the production of chips were so important like in the manufacture of IPads then the chip fabs would have been located in the Philippines or Vietnam, not Singapore.”
Give it a little time… probably cheap power and government taxes can overcome a lot (maybe no endemic corruption and random violence, though).
“Intel opens biggest ever chip plant in Vietnam”, October 29, 2010 by Ian Timberlake:
There is a American Chamber of Commerce Vietnam?
Intel: Vietnam Locations, Ho Chi Minh City.
Jobs at Intel in Vietnam.
“80% of world’s computer chips will be made by Intel Vietnam by 2015: CEO”, Tuoi Tre news, 07/30/2014:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365231
Steve has written about how immigration amounts to a stock dilution scam run by the elites. The elites enrich themselves by increasing the number of shares, which decreases the value held by ordinary citizens. A guaranteed annual income, that is a citizen's dividend, makes this much more explicit and clear to ordinary citizens. Ordinary citizens would immediately recognize that immigration is a stock dilution scam that threatens their dividends.
I don’t see why racist things like numbers or facts would make the Open Borders crowd recognize what they’re advocating.
Also, how is the UBI supposed to be funded? The federal budget outlay in the 2016 budget submission is $4 trillion, but a basic income of just $30,000 for every adult citizen of the US would be over $7 trillion.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365241
That said, if we look at the people who currently have a guaranteed basic income - those on welfare, it doesn't look too promising. I haven't noticed much entrepreneurial spirit in the welfare crowd I've dealt with, unless the guy that used to try to sell me oxycontin at the gas station all the time counts. For that matter, they're not creating works of art or literature, or getting together to improve their communities either. With all that free time they just kind of do... nothing.
Basically, I'm concerned that the people who have it in them to start a company find a way to do it in our current imperfect system, and putting more people on the dole would cause the moral and cultural degradation we see in the welfare class now to become more widespread.
FWIW, I think we are likely on the path to a UBI anyways, because it's a natural outcome of the widening IQ gap and increasing automation. I hope we can find a way to incentivize productivity in absence of fear of poverty. Also, how much of a productivity increase would the private sector need to see to make such a thing feasible? Basic income for 350 million people is a whole lot of tax dollars.
If you watch Wenger’s presentation, he doesn’t pitch the basic income primarily as way to spur more startups. Not everyone has the talent to be a great artist or inventor. But there are other valuable ways they can spend their time, like taking care of a child, or an elderly parent, or volunteering, or whatever. They can also work, and, because no worker will be desperate for a paycheck, employers will have to treat lower wage workers better if they want to hire them.
The interesting thing about Wenger is he is clearly a very bright guy (PhD in computer science from MIT, former startup CEO, current venture capitalist) but he hasn’t yet accepted the logical implication of his basic income with respect to immigration (i.e., that you’ll have to restrict it).
Your description of Wenger could be applied to the majority of the tech/open borders crowd.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365279
[…] nice discussion by Steve Sailer of why “jobs policy” probably means more than supporting entrepreneurs (who will eventually get super rich), even as […]
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365677
The interesting thing about Wenger is he is clearly a very bright guy (PhD in computer science from MIT, former startup CEO, current venture capitalist) but he hasn't yet accepted the logical implication of his basic income with respect to immigration (i.e., that you'll have to restrict it).
I only watched part of it. I’ll try to finish tonight. The arguments I’ve seen on Reddit in favor of UBI are along the lines of if we have one, we’ll suddenly enter a new age of wealth in which everybody is a startup CEO. Hopefully those productive uses of newfound free time would be the result.
Your description of Wenger could be applied to the majority of the tech/open borders crowd.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1365953
The “free trade” agreements combined with changes to make hostile takeovers easier (junk bonds etc) forced it.
The process could only be fought politically but at the time only a few people (Goldsmith, Perot) were warning what would happen while on the other side you had the entire media.
It’s only now that what Goldsmith and Perot warned about has become true that there’s a chance again.
nb it’s not just the US either; the current version of “race to the bottom” globalization traps everyone in a slow death spiral.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1366728
Despite your anti-immigrant sentiment, Andy Grove was born in Budapest, Hungary. He was an immigrant.
Oh, and just in case you think he’s exceptional, I recommend you look up the percentage of start-ups that come from immigrants.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201502/adam-bluestein/the-most-entrepreneurial-group-in-america-wasnt-born-in-america.html
I find that there is a bias amongst social conservatives that immigrants can “never” add to a nation and always are a drain. Grove was undoubtedly a gain for the US and it is a lesser place without him. That is not to say that American corporations don’t use immigration to try to drive down wages (they do), but the idea that immigrants “never” do anything is simplistic and frankly, gives truth to the left wing accusations of right wing racism.
Silicon Valley, whatever its other flaws, would not nearly be as vibrant economically without immigrants.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1371028
[…] The late Andy Grove wrote insightfully on the subject: How America Can Create Jobs: (h/t Steve Sailer) […]
http://www.unz.com/isteve/andy-grove-rip/#comment-1391677