Five Big Ideas on Jobs, the Economy, and the Nation

As staggering as the beginning of artificial intelligence’s ascent has been, it is not the only area where technology or public policy could greatly transform our country.  Here is a group of them.

First and oldest is “Do Brain Implants Change Your Identity?” (Christine Kenneally, The New Yorker, April 19, 2021).  Known in science fiction as alloplastic devices, or body modifications as old as eyeglasses, things being put in brains are neither new nor truly rare – per this article, 200,000 people internationally have “a neural implant of some kind.”  A case study Kenneally used was of a 49-year-old lifelong-epileptic woman who had an experimental device installed that would tell her 15 minutes before she was to have a seizure.  It was successful, both technically and personally – she was sad when the provider’s funding ran out and she needed to have the device removed – and her personality was different before, during, and after its presence, the latter incorporating insights and confidence she had gained.  Clearly, we now have the possibility of people using such devices for general life improvement alone.

Next, a practice now over 50 years old went under the microscope in “Affirmative Action and America’s ‘Cosmetically Diverse’ College Campuses,” a conversation between Jane Coaston, Jay Caspian Kang, Natasha Warikoo, and Ian Rowe in the New York Times on February 9^th, 2022.  Affirmative action, an outgrowth of the 1960s civil rights movement, was only preferential college admission for blacks, intended to alleviate some combination of historical wrongs and generally worse financial and economic outcomes.  The latter, though, has not consistently materialized for several reasons discussed in the piece:  the tendency of accepted blacks to be wealthy; the de facto admission set-asides for experience with upper-class pursuits such as oboes, fencing, and overseas volunteering; what is almost transparent discrimination against other minorities such as Asians; and serious acclimation problems leading to weak success rates.  Another problem with affirmative action as originally, and generally still, implemented is that choosing people only for their race is distasteful, and yet high school success, along with standardized test scores, varies greatly between racial groups.  It will be up to universities to decide if more blacks is what they want, or would prefer richer students who rate to donate more, or would actually want to provide more help for those with lower family incomes.  The outcome will shape the country more than we may know.

Could it be that “the Internet Is Having Its Midlife Crisis” (Nikki Usher, Slate.com, December 5^th)?  This article was published soon before the current AI boom – that, along with “ChatGPT” and “chatbot,” do not appear in the text.  Instead, the author considers that “many of us who have grown up along with the web are now reaching middle age, and we have enough experience with the internet to know what it does well and does poorly,” and that “many of us have long argued that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms are public utilities – they provide an essential service to the public by enabling the flow of communication that supports communities, commerce, and access to critical information.”  Usher thought that was the right view, and that such sites should be either fully government-owned or by a “public-private partnership.”  I have advocated wide-scope, even nationwide, Internet access, but the platforms themselves are hardly guaranteed to stay the same, and competition, as weak as it is, would be snuffed out by a one-owner, one-product-per-type mandate.  That alone makes this idea undesirable.

Around the middle of the last decade, there were books on the subject of “Why the Age of American Progress Ended” (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, January 2023).  This effort printed out to 26 pages.  Thompson spent the first half telling how, over 10,000 years, smallpox appeared and, though a series of events leading to the first vaccine and its proliferation, was cured.  Next, he tried to make the case that such is too rare in our country now, as “the American government has focused overwhelmingly on discovery rather than deployment,” and many initiatives become hamstrung by legal restrictions and lack of private funding interest.  Examples he cited were high-speed rail, nuclear power plants, and even solar and wind farms, the latter “held back by environmental regulations that ironically constrict (their) construction.”  He contrasted those with the success of Covid-19 vaccines, which called for not only “technological breakthroughs,” but, perhaps more importantly, “a policy miracle – a feat of bureaucratic ingenuity that would make, distribute, and administer novel vaccines with record-breaking efficiency.”  Yet, still, the virus failed for many people who refused to use it.  Conservative thinking, though, is hardly the only one to blame for lack of advancement, as “cities and states run by Democrats have erected so many barriers to construction” that “the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington.”  A lot to improve, but the problems here are real.

Last, we would like to know “How to Make the Labor Market Work for More Americans” (The New York Times, January 28^th).  This Editorial Board piece lauded Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for removing probably unnecessary bachelor’s-degree requirement for “the vast majority of jobs in the state government.”  With many employers looking in vain for workers, there should be a general falling-away of requirements, of certification as well as education, put into place as ways of thinning out the number of qualified applicants.  This was a fine move indeed.  As for the others above, some would be and some would not be – it is up to us to more strongly support the worthiest big ideas.