Week of December 25, 2000
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

MORE STEM-CELL POLITICS: Salon correspondent Arthur Allen reports that HHS-secretary designate Tommy Thompson has firmly supported stem-cell research in Wisconsin, suggesting that his "pro-life" credentials may actually be about preserving life. Those devoted to defining microscopic clusters of undifferentiated cells as human beings are not happy with the Wisconsin governor, but they're not going to get a friendlier appointee past Congress. [Posted 12/31.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: The great economist Ronald Coase is 90 today. To honor this happy occasion, read the autobiography he gave the Nobel Foundation when he won the prize, his Wall Street Journal interview, or his Reason interview. Better yet, buy his book and read Coase's ground-breaking articles yourself. "The Nature of the Firm" and "The Problem of Social Cost" are accessible, deep, and essential to any serious understanding of economic institutions. [Posted 12/29]

PRO-LIFE POSITION: Italy looks about to join the U.S., Britain, Germany, and France in approving stem-cell cloning. Let's hope the United States stays a member of that club. Back during the election, Gore-supporting scientists (and Michael J. Fox) argued that a Bush victory would endanger the future of such life-saving research. I doubt it, though a lot of conservative activists hope so. (National Review Online touts pro-death bioethicist Leon Kass for head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, while The Weekly Standard's David Brooks extends his loathing of biotechnology and its researchers to an attack on Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin! What's next, a scathing indictment of George Washington?) But my money's on the resolute pragmatism of the American people and of the down-to-earth president-elect. A man who picks former pharmaceutical industry execs to head OMB and the DoD is not a man who hates medical progress. As usual on such things, Ron Bailey has ably explored the science and ethics of stem-cell research. [Posted 12/28]

EDUCATION PRESIDENT: If George W. is as serious about real education reform as he appears—and he appears downright obsessive—he'll name my favorite politician to head the Department of Education. She's Lisa Graham-Keegan, superintendent of public instruction in Arizona and the brains behind that state's combination of wide-open charter schools and feedback via testing to assess value-added from year to year (as opposed to what kids know when they start). Smart liberals like her because she's for equalizing funding. But she wants to do it by "strapping the money to the kid," not moving it between bureaucracies. She's smart, she's funny, she's good-looking, she's dynamic (in all senses of the word), and she convincingly says her favorite book is The Fatal Conceit. She campaigned for fellow Arizonan John McCain, which makes her almost as bipartisan as a Democrat. To get real reform, which must include some form of competition and choice, Bush will need her willingness to think outside the usual categories. [Posted 12/28]

SILICON VOLLEY: Everything I hate about Washington b.s. artists and TV talk show booking combined in a singular exchange on last night's Hardball (12/27), when my friend Christopher Hitchens, looking more deathly ill than usual, feebly attempted to counter a truly extraordinary claim by Paul Begala—that Silicon Valley is entirely a result of Clinton-era deficit reduction (which itself is a product of brave tax hikes). Here's a piece of the exchange:

Nonsense is to be expected from Paul Begala, who spews it for a living, but what's really infuriating about this exchange is that viewers of talk shows like Hardball can't expect guests to know the sort of basic business history every state development officer and subscriber to BusinessWeek knows. When do they think the term "Silicon Valley" entered the public consciousness? 1995? Have they ever considered the "Silicon" in the name? Begala not only managed to suggest that the Valley was a sluggish backwater until 1993, but HE GOT AWAY WITH IT. Hitchens, who obviously sensed something was seriously wrong, didn't know enough to mention that, ahem, the PERSONAL COMPUTER REVOLUTION occurred in the early 1980s (known in D.C. as the Reagan administration—not that Reagan had much to do with it). It may be too much to expect political junkies to know anything about the waves of business innovation and investment, booms and busts, between then and now, but surely they've heard of Apple, Intel, and Microsoft. Right?

It reminds me of a few years ago when Rich Karlgaard, then editor of Forbes ASAP and now publisher of Forbes, came back from some gathering of Washington conservatives absolutely dumbfounded that not one of them had even heard of Cisco Systems. He had no idea. Expecting Beltway people to have heard of Cisco is like asking George W. Bush to name the Indian agriculture undersecretary's undersecretary. These people are still working on the basics. That is, my husband points out, the secret to Lester Thurow's otherwise mystifying success. He tells political types what they would have known if they'd read BusinessWeek.. It's out-of-date and usually wrong, but it's still more than they knew before. [Posted 12/28]

ON A POSITIVE NOTE: As a fun, and very true, portrait of Silicon Valley life, I highly recommend Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley, which I finally got around to reading this week. Here's a snatch from the introduction that sets up why the book is so good:

This isn't just an author boasting. It appears to be true. And when Bronson writes about individuals I know, he gets them right; the same is true for types. The book stands up, regardless of what the NASDAQ does, because it's not just about the money. [Posted 12/28]

TAKING PRECAUTIONS: Is Christine Todd Whitman a green extremist, or is she just ignorant? Ron Bailey, Reason's able science correspondent, worries that George W. Bush's choice to head the EPA has embraced the "precautionary principle," which generally opposes technological change, regardless of its potential advantages, if there is any downside risk. Citing a Scientific American article, he emails that Whitman has declared that "policymakers need to take a precautionary approach to environmental protection....We must acknowledge that uncertainty is inherent in managing natural resources, recognize it is usually easier to prevent environmental damage than to repair it later, and shift the burden of proof away from those advocating protection toward those proposing an action that may be harmful." This burden shifting is indeed troubling—a prescription for never doing anything, since all actions have potential dangers. We can only hope that Whitman is more gullible than ardent. Her speech did seem more interested in increasing research funding than in squelching technology. If she does make precaution her mantra, she may face intra-administration opposition. The Scientific American piece, which provides a nice roundup of links on the subject, identifies attorney general designate John Ashcroft as a foe of the idea. For the best analysis of the flaws in the precautionary principle, see Ron's Reason article. [Posted 12/26]

ORGANIC CHEMISTRY: What should we make of the Agriculture Departments new labeling standards for organic food? My pessimistic friends worry that the label disallows genetically modified foods even if grown otherwise "organically." But I'm cautiously optimistic. As Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman said in announcing the standards, "The organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety." More bluntly, organic, like kosher or halal, is a label that recognizes food taboos held sacred by a subculture. Food taboos don't have to be rational to be honored in the marketplace, and standards serve simply to avoid what amounts to fraud. While I'd prefer to see privately policed standards, merely establishing government rules for organic food should have no effect on the rest of the marketplace. What's important for the future evolution of food technology is that non-organic food avoid stigmatizing labels. [Posted 12/26]

TRIAL AND ERROR: I've always hated the term "the new economy," believing that it's just "the economy." It's true that the economy is constantly evolving, but calling select parts of it "new" was mostly a way for fashionable types to associate themselves with cool things like entrepreneurship and computers while avoiding icky things like oil, chemicals, and disposable diapers (where do you think those computer keyboards and CDs come from—organically grown trees?). But, much as I hate the concept, the new economy bashing that becomes louder with every dip in the NASDAQ is ridiculous. EVERY BURST OF EXPERIMENTATION INVOLVES FAILURES. That was true when personal computer companies cratered in the early 1980s, it was true when frozen yogurt parlors went boom and bust in the late '80s, it was true with the turn-of-the-century auto industry, and it's true today. It doesn't mean an elaborate fraud was going on. Sorting out bad ideas is as critical to dynamic progress as trying new things. [Posted 12/26]

NEW AGAIN: Perfectly timed to hammer home the point that the new economy/old economy distinction is nonsensical, while suggesting that "new economy" trends are a lot more pervasive than the dot-com craze, the always illuminating Jonathan Rauch combines his instincts for analysis and his love of how things really work to look at how information technology is transforming dirty old industries like oil. Jonathan is, like me, a child of the 1970s, when everyone told us the future was going to be terrible, largely because we'd run out of oil and other resources. They were wrong, and the reasons make a complex and inspiring story. [Posted 12/26]

PARDON MILKEN: Bill Clinton has been asked by a big donor to pardon Michael Milken, and he should do so. Even Milken's former persecutor Rudolph Giuliani says as much. Milken did time in federal prison after pleading guilty to the esoteric and ill-defined crime of "stock parking" as part of a deal to keep his younger brother out of prison. It's not clear he ever actually did anything criminal and, if so, his ill deeds were far outweighed by the good he did—not merely as a long-time philanthropist (the argument you hear from most pardon advocates) but as the financier who made possible the restructuring of American business and the creation of such major new competitors as MCI. Clinton owes Milken big time. He helped make the "Clinton era" of prosperity possible. And there's the empathy factor: Milken was the Democratic victim of zealous Republican prosecutors. [Posted 12/26]