David Brooks eulogizes the bygone Culture Clash.

    By Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 1:34pm |

    Writing from a remote location and employing a pun that would embarrass a ninth grade writing class Brooks has managed to turn the memory of Steve Jobs's life into a commentary on innovation-less joblessness. 

    NYT Article: Where are the Jobs?(I have trouble even typing it) by David  Brooks.

    To wit: even given Steve Jobs brilliance and Apple's product development, when you ex out the incredible gains in information technology, innovation is generally slowing down, not much has really happened in the last 41 years. There's only been a 47% increase in agricultural yields in the last three decades. No new blockbuster drugs in the pipeline. So far, not so innovative.

    But why has innovation stalled? Three things. We reached a "trough" in such things as research into Alzheimer's; there's been a universal loss of utopian elan as might have been found in the 1938 World's Fair or Bell Labs in its heyday; and--there is no essential culture clash--ah, the segue to Steve Jobs.

    What underpinned Jobs' success was a melding of "idea networks"-like geek-dom, hippie counterculture, (the culture clash)and corporate America. Drugs and jeans are thrown into the mix. Unfortunately it's all gone, no more culture clash, no more innovation, no more--wait, it's in here some place, hmm. Where have all the.....

    In case you didn't get it, I'll repeat it. "There is no essential culture clash"--the word "essential" perhaps being an anchor to windward, possibly against the coming gale force wind blowing up from Occupy Wall Street.

    In his self administered conservative myopia Brooks has rehashed the story of a corrupted social movement of the 60's, and landed in a clash-less trough of innovation.

    Brooks may be correct in saying that there is a blockage between the potential of innovation and ability to get out of the trough. But to show primary causation as a lack of culture clash when we are in the second greatest economic meltdown in a century is purposeful evasion of the facts of a struggling economy, unemployment, and the monopoly of capital.  

    What Brooks fails to show is that working our way out of this banking crisis cum economic meltdown is in itself the prospect of the greatest innovation in our society since WWII. Why does innovation just pertain to products? Clearly innovation just as appropriately pertains to our societal structure, our infrastructure and our educational programs and institutions. But we could never find the resources to achieve this form of innovation because we are in a trough. Perhaps a circular trough.  

    Forgetting Brooks' usual conservative swipes at how over eager environmentalists and lawyers thwart innovation, he closes with a coup de grace:

    "If you want to be the next Steve Jobs and end the innovation stagnation, maybe you should start in hip-hop."  What a pompous jerk of a line.  

    No, David Brooks, don't go to hip hop. Don't even go to 60's counterculture.. That's not the culture down in Occupy Wall St. You are disingenuous about both our cultural stagnation and the culture warriors who have been incubating all the while but who are just beginning to make their voices heard. You want to see culture clash? Be careful what you wish for.

     

    Comments

    There's an empty pike somewhere ...


    by Donal on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:11pm

    Now that's innovation we can believe in.


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:49pm

    What does wearing jeans to work have to do with counter cultural? Computer geeks worked long hard hours in the early days and dressed comfortable.

    by trkingmomoe on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:12pm

    That was all o.k, he says. Just that it doesn't motivate anyone any more to be able to run around in jeans and have recreation areas. Gosh, they all just lack innovation these days.


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:47pm

    David Brooks can blow me.  Along with David Gergen.  But that would make me gay, and there are already too many suspicions about that.  So never mind.


    by Richard the Ele... on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:31pm

    David Brooks once wrote that it was wrong for spouses to keep separate checking accounts, so probably no on that one. But Gergen, possibly. In the very least he has prostituted himself at CNN.


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:43pm

    su·per·cil·i·ous

       [soo-per-sil-ee-uhs] Show IPA
    adjective
    haughtily disdainful or contemptuous, as a person or a facial expression.
     
    In other words, Brooks is a super-silly arsehole.


    by Richard Day on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:39pm

    But if you use up all of those words, what do you have left for Tom Friedman?


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:48pm

    Who's super-silly, us?


    by Donal on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:50pm

    Brooks is an idiot of course, evident since well before his 'salad bar at Applebee's' gaff.

    The utopian elan is still there, we believed a sociopath lying fool of a failure from Texas could lead us into a New American Century by getting Saddam, and we could pay for it by shopping and selling real estate to one another. We believed we could spread democracy with our guns, our youth and crackpot neoconservative Republicans in the the GOP White House. We had the confidence and the savvy to think the Boyz of Wall Street could police themselves, and that capitalism was self regulating, never needing a government rescue, and that the highly compensated, barely taxed, financiers were essential to prosperity and not the destroyers of it. We have the bravado to elect people and support big media organizations that openly deride science, facts or planning beyond the next election. We believe billionaire owners of companies whose foreign subsidiaries make deals with terrorist nations are patriots, and the Republicans they support are the 'party of values'. We have the moxie to demand both a ban on choice for women, and cuts in health care and aid to the poor and poor children. If we are still moving at the speeds of the 1950's in our transportation sector, it is because the country and the Congress at that time was willing to plan, raise the revenues, and educate the population, to do big things to make this nation greater. Too many voters, and the politicians they support, plan nothing bigger than 'stopping' a President with real ideas for the future, or to simply use the government as a cudgel to force their 'values' or 'Christian' culture on everyone else but themselves.


    by NCD on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 2:52pm

    Fabulous take on the utopian elan. Really great. Thanks.


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 3:11pm

    Despite agreeing with every word of your brilliant assessment of 'the way we live now' (title of a Trollope novel about a similar period) I'll make my habitual  defense of Brooks: seems like a decent guy, who's thought long and hard about our situation . And come to the wrong conclusions.


    by Flavius on Sat, 10/08/2011 - 11:21am

    email posts allow events like the Occupy... movement to spread like wildfire. Amazon has lowered the price of it's book and video reader to $200 and libraries are offering new and classic books in ebook fashion. As the technology advances, space requirements for libraries will decrease allowing funds to obtain access to more electronic books. People have access to information more rapidly then they ever have in the past. The innovation has one unnoticed by Brooks.

    For lack of anything better to do, I watched Bill Mahrer's show last night. It was shameful how  stupid PJ O'Rourke, a supposed bright star of Libertarianism, appeared when pitted against Alan Grayson. O'Rourke had witty comments, Grayson countered with facts. In the past those who spread falsehoods had a time advantage because it took a relatively long time to counter falsehoods. The innovation that Brooks has missed is the rapidity with which any citizen can access data to refute false claims.

    Newspapers, magazines, movies, and television have all had to try to innovate to keep up. Small production companies can post webisodes. which if popular enough. can pay production costs and make a profit. The world is innovating. Brooks is stuck in an old medium.

     


    by rmrd0000 on Sat, 10/08/2011 - 1:13pm

    I think the point about small production companies is very much to the point. At no time before could companies like these get started with so little capital.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 10/09/2011 - 2:18pm

    This graph shows huge crop yield improvements since 1960:

    The modern PC world is only 30 years old, and is hitting a completely new era with flash hard drives and optical/nano chips and cloud computing infrastructure in the next 3 years.

    Computer-assisted drug tech is just hitting stride, such as a major breakthrough in finding the genetic origin of ALS. Genome mapping was only finalized in the last decade.

    We're in the middle of a major shift from internal combustion to electric vehicles.

    US manufacturing output is about the same as China's with 1/9th the workers:

    http://www.productgss.com/2011/03/china-manufacturing-edges-out-u-s-in-manufacturing-but-is-no-match-for-u-s-productivity/

    http://www.productgss.com/2009/02/made-in-the-usa-isnt-dead-just-different/

    There are major advances in alternate energy, as well as decreases in energy consumption.

    There are major efforts on environmental cleanup. Maglev & other transportation technologies. 

    Possibly the only good to come out of our wars is a major advance in medical technology, such as artificial limbs.

    It's also useful to understand that compared to the 1800's, the 1900's discoveries were pretty name - nothing life-changing like electricity, refrigeration, automobiles & the internal combustion engine, air flight (ok, 1903, but pretty much there), vaccines and bacteriology, genetics & evolution (plus Lamarckism which we'll see more of a revival over the next decade), the Curies' work on radiation. Even Einstein's theory of Relativity was published in 1905.

    What Brooks undoubtedly misses is that it's more of an age for cooperative work than individual heroes. Project Management is picking up as a way of guaranteeing results. Social media and internet collaboration from open source to teleconferencing to telecommuting tie into a connected way of working. Teamwork becomes more important than pure "leadership" - companies can't risk depending on a single hero.

    The amount of information processed by kids today might be 100 times what they got in the 1960's in terms of vivid cultural information, access to language, display of scientific principles, access to on-line dictionaries & encyclopedias, even translation services.

    What's also missed is what innovation is. It's hard to say that Steve Jobs invented anything. I had the same idea for iTunes as he did as early as 1994, and I certainly was no genius or unique. But iTunes succeeded through organization, not innovation - a successful business model, key agreements with industry professionals plus harnessing the right delivery mechanisms.

    One of Steve Jobs' key advantages is Supply Chain Management, an aspect few people think about. Besides being a bastard about sourcing at extremely low prices, he was also a genius at keeping parts & total units delivered on time, as well as cornering the market on key components to give his competitors headaches.

    The Mac came from Xerox, and while Apple probably had innovations, the main bit was design and a business case - Xerox was too stodgy to productize its research, but Jobs & Woz paid to get in the door and walked out with all the ideas they needed.

    Pixar was a technial innovation by George Lucas - Jobs turned it into a business success, with key Disney deals.

    If anything, Jobs was better at killing technology and dumbing down devices if he didn't see an immediate purpose. The iPad was released to ridicule at how much it was missing.

    As interesting as "innovation" is, something like distribution is likely much more important. Nokia phones weren't so innovative - they were just great at getting solid phones everywhere in the world. Wal-Mart grew to a behemoth based on innovative distribution technology. Ikea's advantage is distribution and design for DIY construction. Amazon's distribution network is every bit as important as its on-line access, and that network has turned into a successful cloud computing business as well, with data centers the size of multiple football fields.

    Even with agricultural productivity, the bigger issue is distribution - famines only occur due to wars and natural catastrophes like earthquakes now - even something like flowers can be sourced from South Africa and distributed around Europe. And I doubt someone like David Brooks has taste for anything as mundane as distribution.

    A while ago a well known economist studied the question of how it was possible to walk out of his office in Manhattan and get a sandwich with fresh tomato and lettuce - what were all the processes that went into making this tiny miracle?

    Forget all the innovation doomsdayers. It was just 22 years ago that we still had the Cold War with us, staring down Russia and the antagonistic China, concerned about imminent overpopulation. 

    Now we have a friendly China with no population growth that's rounded the bend in feeding its population, and handling the migration from rural to urban, and starting on the trip to managing the environment.

    We have a defanged Russia, with no new military menace (other than ourselves).

    We have major innovations in computing, dispersed communications, production and cooperation to drive new growth.

    The main thing working against us is an idiotic, vampire banking system that's sucked much of the innovation out of the system. And that's something Brooks seems to support.


    by PeraclesPlease (not verified) on Sat, 10/08/2011 - 2:42pm

    ^This.

    Also, I find it hilarious that while some are complaining about robots not just taking manual jobs but also being poised to take white-collar jobs others are complaining about a lack of innovation. I can hear the justification now: oh, but that's not really innovation because (a)"I don't understand it"/(b)"It's not in my pet field"/(c)"It's not something I approve of"/(d)"It's only incremental improvements (see also (a))".


    by Verified Atheist on Sun, 10/09/2011 - 8:32am

    Very well put, VA. I especially like (b), it's not in my field.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 10/09/2011 - 2:16pm

    Thanks, Peracles, some excellent and relevant points.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 10/09/2011 - 2:14pm

    Nobel Prize For Economics Will Likely Go To Growth Theorists, Experts Say
    By Malin Rising, Huffington Post, Oct. 9, 2011

    STOCKHOLM — Researchers who study economic growth and how technology helps drive long-term development are among the top contenders for the Nobel prize for economics being awarded Monday, Swedish Nobel guessers say.

    A day before the announcement of the prestigious....award, Americans Robert Barro and Paul Romer stand out as favorites for the prize for their research on growth, leading experts say.

    The Nobel Committee maintains it doesn't pay attention to current events when picking a winner, but an award to growth theory would be closely watched as the world debates how to revive the economy in the face of large public spending cuts.

    [.....]

    "His research is focused on powers within technology and development that drive growth, that had previously been overlooked," Waldenstrom told The Associated Press. "He has showed that it is actually significant for long-term growth and has changed our view of what drives growth."

    Romer has constructed mathematical models showing how technological advances are the result of specific decisions to invest in research and development. Later, he advanced his ideas, concluding that to make real progress, societies must also keep implementing better rules that structure how people work together.

    He could share the prize with growth theory pioneer Barro, a professor of economics at Harvard University, who has specifically looked at the links between innovation, public investment and growth.....

    [....]


    by artappraiser on Sun, 10/09/2011 - 7:32pm

    Thank you so much Artsy. Who would have thought that better rules within societies on how people work together would have any effect upon innovation.Why, it smacks of socialism.  Innovation is simply exclusive circles of specific corporate executives exploiting markets. Well,we won't burden a free trader, 19th century industrialist like Mr. Brooks with anything which is outside his comfort zone of economic stagnation.

    Thanks again.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 10/09/2011 - 9:38pm

    Welcome; just ran across it and it reminded me of this thread. We shall soon see if the Nobel committee really does want to promote this "school." That would kind of interestingly sync with all the "mourning Steve Jobs" mania of both the Brooks and non-Brooks kind.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 10/09/2011 - 10:48pm

    I've been trying to recall a reference to a book on "lateral society", the idea being a general restructuring.

    What just occured to me is that if society is changing to a "horizontal" structure emphasizing new forms of communication, grass roots innovation and community organization outside what we are used to, a vertical, authoritarian structure--that the sense of this is what is scaring people. It's not socialism per se, but a new form of freedom that threatens people. Change, and especially freedom, is a frightening prospect.


    by Oxy Mora on Mon, 10/10/2011 - 7:31am

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