Blue Balls

 Donald Trump Is Sucking the Life-Blood Out of America

Ad Nauseam Entrepreneurialism

John Torinus has an interesting article, UW System Needs New Kind of Leader, which raises pertinent issues and offers some reasonable options.

The only area I have strong disagreement with is his recommendation to "Emphasize entrepreneurship on each campus. Entrepreneurs re-invent economies, which Wisconsin will need in the rebound from our deepening recession. Some campuses are well down this path."

Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurialism, etc. has been pushed ad nauseam over the past few decades. This serious-sounding talking-point has little supporting evidence. This idea that everyone is a business mogul and everyone should be investing and/or starting a new business or venture, is a big reason this country is so ill-informed, ill-prepared, has crumbling infrastructure, and has seen the environment continually degraded.

The UWM Center for Economic Development performed an exhaustive study debunking the myth of the entrepreneurial university. The Hechinger Report echoed similar findings in Think universities are making lots of money from inventions? Think again. Derek Lowe found similar results for his article Innovation, at Universities and in Industry. Two others whom have studied the issue extensively, Matthew Wisnioski and Lee Vinsel, have noted identical results, most recently in The Campus Innovation Myth.

The "entrepreneurialism" drum is one that we should have stopped pounding long ago.

Weekend Reading

Trump Again Sues Over Property Tax Bill For Jupiter Golf Course
The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem
Good News: Wages Are Up
Experts Say This Is The Ideal Retirement Savings Timeline
The U.S. Drops Out Of The Top 10 In Innovation Ranking
The Right Question About Inequality And Growth
A New Map For America
An Unwelcome Tax Surprise Could Soon Lurk In Your Paycheck
Big Money Rules
President Trump's First Year, In 14 Metrics
Kansas Provides Compelling Evidence Of Failure Of "Supply-Side" Tax Cuts

Sunday Reading

The Forty-Year Slump
The Disruption Machine
The Voluntarism Fantasy
The Plot Against Public Education
Here's How Climate Change Has Altered Life On Earth In The Past 20 Years
Selling Fast: Public Goods, Profits, And State Legitimacy
Shrinking The Financial Sector Will Make Us All Richer
U.S. Adds 321,000 Jobs, The Most In Nearly 3 Years
Which City Has The Most Unpredictable Weather?

Government: The Mother Of (Much) Invention

Government - Not Business - Has Been The Source Of Breakthrough Innovation

The New York Times obituary for Douglas C. Englebart, identified as the “Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse,” is fascinating reading, in part because Englebart, an Oregon farm boy, was in many ways the father of modern networked computing. Beginning in the early 1960s, he put together a team of engineers and computer scientists, funded by the federal government, that developed a prototype for most of the computer tools we all take for granted today...

Mariana Mazzucato, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, has been making the point very effectively in lectures and a new book, The Entrepreneurial State, that the real innovation engine in the global economy is not business, nor the market, but the government. A recent story about Mazzucato in Forbes cites her view that long-term, patient capital–provided by government–is the absolute prerequisite for breakthrough innovation.

“Her case study for myth-debunking is the iPhone, that icon of American corporate innovation. Each of its core technologies–capacitive sensors, solid-state memory, the click wheel, GPS, internet, cellular communications, Siri, microchips, touchscreen—came from research efforts and funding support of the U.S. government and military."