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China and the U.S. economy: Fallows follows the money

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I know I linked to it yesterday, but that just wasn’t enough.

If you want to understand the world economy today, and what has happened during the last decade between the U.S. and China, amd how the Chinese have ended up holding $1.4 trillion, you need to sit down and read James Fallows’ piece in the new Atlantic. (In the time between the piece’s research and its publication that number jumped to $1.53 trillion, Fallows reports on his blog — another reason you should read the piece!)

This is a topic of sufficient complexity that most of us have very little hope of understanding it, yet Fallows lays it out with care and clarity. Here are a handful of key passages, offered primarily to get you to click on the link to the full piece, because that’s what you should do:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus — $1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day — that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends — suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic — will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere…

Neither government likes to draw attention to this arrangement, because it has been so convenient on both sides. For China, it has helped the regime guide development in the way it would like — and keep the domestic economy’s growth rate from crossing the thin line that separates “unbelievably fast” from “uncontrollably inflationary.” For America, it has meant cheaper iPods, lower interest rates, reduced mortgage payments, a lighter tax burden. But because of political tensions in both countries, and because of the huge and growing size of the imbalance, the arrangement now shows signs of cracking apart…

So why is China shipping its money to America? An economist would describe the oddity by saying that China has by far the highest national savings in the world. This sounds admirable, but when taken to an extreme — as in China — it indicates an economy out of sync with the rest of the world, and one that is deliberately keeping its own people’s living standards lower than they could be…

This is the bargain China has made — rather, the one its leaders have imposed on its people. They’ll keep creating new factory jobs, and thus reduce China’s own social tensions and create opportunities for its rural poor. The Chinese will live better year by year, though not as well as they could. And they’ll be protected from the risk of potentially catastrophic hyperinflation, which might undo what the nation’s decades of growth have built. In exchange, the government will hold much of the nation’s wealth in paper assets in the United States, thereby preventing a run on the dollar, shoring up relations between China and America, and sluicing enough cash back into Americans’ hands to let the spending go on.

So what’s the problem? There are several. One is that the U.S. has set up a tough situation for itself if it finds itself in conflict with China some time in the future.

Whatever the provocation, China would consider its levers and weapons and find one stronger than all the rest — one no other country in the world can wield. Without China’s billion dollars a day, the United States could not keep its economy stable or spare the dollar from collapse.

Would the Chinese use that weapon? The reasonable answer is no, because they would wound themselves grievously, too. Their years of national savings are held in the same dollars that would be ruined; in a panic, they’d get only a small share out before the value fell. Besides, their factories depend on customers with dollars to spend.

But that “reassuring” answer is actually frightening. Lawrence Summers calls today’s arrangement “the balance of financial terror,” and says that it is flawed in the same way that the “mutually assured destruction” of the Cold War era was.

I think you’d better just go read the rest now.
[tags]china, world economy, u.s. trade deficit, james fallows[/tags]

Around the economic world in four headlines

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Many years ago, thanks to some mutual friends, I had the privilege of meeting the late George W.S. Trow, and of sitting in on a class he was giving as part of a journalism workshop at Bard College. Each morning Trow would sit down with the day’s New York Times front page and begin to find links between the stories — not hypertext (this was way pre-Web), but causal connections, cross-currents and submerged conflicts, relationships that the newspaper couldn’t or wouldn’t overtly illuminate but that you could make out if you just let the stories rub against one another in your mind.

The author of In the Context of No Context (which I wrote about in Salon a decade ago) was giving us a lesson in how to place the loose atoms of conventional news reporting into molecular structures of context. Once the lesson took, the methodology was impossible to shake.

I got those old Trowvian vibrations again this morning as I scanned the front-page of the Wall Street Journal — crammed as it is these days with four or five headlines where there used to be three, an immediate result of the new Murdoch regime.

The lead story, “Trader Made Billions on Subprime,” tells of hedge fund operator John Paulson, who has made $3 to $4 billion, personally, by “betting against the housing and mortgage markets.” Since those markets, you may have heard, have been going through a rough patch, Paulson’s “bets” paid off.

Paulson himself sounds almost contrite about his success: he’s “reluctant to celebrate while housing causes others pain,” intends to increase his charitable giving, and thinks that “a lot of homeowners have been victimized.”

This stands in contrast to Los Angeles real estate investor Jeff Greene, the subject of the Journal’s second lead, a friend of Paulson’s. Paulson invited Greene into his housing-crash fund, but Greene went off and implemented the investment strategy on his own. Paulson is irked, but Greene protests, “He never told me, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

The “bet” paid off for Greene, too. He now has three jets. (What does one do with three jets?) He believes that he is “pretty conservative in the way I spend money”; after all, his newest jet is an “older model” Gulfstream that he got for only $2 million — a steal!

We understand that the financial engineers of Wall Street have always been handsomely rewarded. Lots of people and institutions in the financial industry lost the gambles that Paulson and company won. But I can’t help thinking there is something broken with a system in which Olympian financiers place their bets on incomprehensible financial instruments and risk winning or losing bonuses and jets — while these same transactions bear real consequences that are very comprehensible and tangible for the people whose lives they affect. When the roulette wheel of the derivatives market stops, some people get to buy jet number three; other people lose their homes.

Which leads us to headline number three: “States to Tighten Belts as Weakness of Economy Cuts Into Tax Receipts.” Here we move down from the rarefied air of Wall Street back into the thicker atmosphere of everyday reality, where, it seems, the mistakes made in the mortgage market — all the stuff that Paulson “bet” against — are now dragging down the economy, dampening consumer spending, slowing economic growth, reducing employment and cutting into government coffers. Which means less money for schools and police and children’s healthcare and other stuff that people without three jets — or even two jets! — might care about.

Finally, if your eyes scan down the page, you hit headline number four, “Toxic Factories Take Toll on China’s Labor Force” — an account of the cadmium battery industry. Making the batteries requires toxic chemicals, and when the U.S. started regulating their manufacture, the industry simply moved to a lower-cost, no-hassle home in China, and took its poisonous impact with it.

The story pulls our gaze out from the national to the global scale, reminding us that the U.S. economy now rests, even more completely than in the past, on foreign foundations. James Fallows explains how in painfully clear terms in the new Atlantic:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

There you have it: the story of the economic world today, from prosperous financial buccaneers to worried middle-class America to the developing-world workforce that can only dream of someday upgrading its problems to the sort we in the United States contend with. It’s all on the Journal’s front page today, but the newspaper won’t connect the dots for you — that work is left to each of us.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir

[tags]george trow, wall street journal, subprime crisis[/tags]

The value of coming clean about mistakes

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The 10ZenMonkeys blog has the transcript of an extraordinary speech by Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland delivered at a recent conference for the Craigslist Foundation. (Found via BoingBoing.)

This passage about admitting your mistakes is worth taking to heart, particularly for those newsroom veterans who scratch their heads over posts like my last one:

Number Three, Don’t Lie. This is for real. There is something about the relationship between the not-for-profit sector, the government, the foundations, and the donors that creates a massive incentive to lie — flagrantly, and often.

And it’s not just a one-sided thing. The relationship between not-for-profits and foundations is like the relationship between teenagers and parents. You don’t really want to tell them everything that’s going on, and they don’t really want to know. So there’s this dance of deceit, shall we say.

“What’d you do this weekend?”
“Oh… Studied! With my friends.”

And the parents say “Good! So glad to hear that!” Because they don’t want to know. And so what do you say?

“How did the year go?”
“We had success after success! All goals were met, and a good time was had by all.”

And what was there left to say? “Good! Good!” They don’t want to know about the youth in your program that cussed you out and set the building on fire. They don’t want to know that you hired somebody once again who was a complete idiot. They don’t want to know, and you don’t want to tell them, and therefore we all stay very ignorant. Then the actual innovation curve has flattened out, because nobody’s telling the truth about what we’re going through any more. We’re all self-deceiving and trying to make it look good.

At the Ella Baker Center, we adopted a reporting form that freaked out our board and advisors. It was very simple: highlights, low lights, and lessons learned. We created a discipline in the organization that we would report out the bad stuff. First of all, everybody knows the bad stuff anyway, because the person you fired is talking right now, so it’s not like it’s not out there. But did you learn anything?

Program officers at foundations, donors, and philanthropists are just inundated with lying, false crap. And they know they’re being lied to. If you took all your annual reports and just read them end to end, you’d have to conclude that we’re now living in a socialist paradise. Everything’s going well, people are being served, and all the children are happy. And then you look at any newspaper, and it’s very clear that we might be fudging a bit.

So my experience has been that donors and program officers love to actually get the truth. They don’t punish you for it if you learned something. I think if all of us started to confess a little bit more, we would learn a little bit faster.

Fool for a CTO

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This past summer I paid a happy visit to the Motley Fool — in downtown Alexandria, just across the river from D.C. proper — to meet the technical team there and give a talk on Dreaming in Code.

I was pretty impressed with the people I met and the lively atmosphere at the company — unpretentious but serious about the important stuff. Anyway, the Fool is now looking for a new CTO. I know from experience that that’s a tough position to fill, but maybe one of you reading this is interested — or knows someone who’d be. More info here.

Clash of the titanic business-press cliches

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My eight-year-old sons don’t pay much attention to the business pages, but yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Business cover — featuring three cartoon characters in a boxing ring — caught their eyes over breakfast.

“Who’s the big fat guy?”

That, I told them, was supposed to be Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO. “The one in glasses?” Bill Gates. They’ve heard of him. The third figure, I said, was a poor likeness of Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

As their interest dwindled, I explained the illustration. And it occurred to me what about the cover bugged me. The headline, no joke, was “Clash of the Titans” (omitted from the Web edition, for some reason). And the whole tired frame for the story had been constructed with an eye to the sensibility of eight-year-olds.

It’s the oldest cliche in the business-journalism book: Corporations are led by warriors and market conflicts are military campaigns — “clashes of the titans.” The trouble is, it’s not only infantile, it distorts our understanding of reality.

Are Microsoft and Google in conflict? Of course. They have fundamentally different visions of where computing’s headed — visions that the Times article, by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft, ably lays out. But it’s not as if they are feudal fiefdoms fighting over some fixed patch of ground. Their conflict will play out as each company builds its next generation of software and services, and the next one after that, and people make choices about what to buy and what to use.

Those choices are the key to the outcome. In a battle, civilians are mostly bystanders or casualties. In the software business, civilians — users — determine who wins.

Remember that the next time you see a business publication trot out the old corporate-battlefield cliches to talk about the software industry. And if you want to know where the software world is headed, watch your nearest eight- or ten- or twelve-year old — they’ll be making decisions over the next couple of decades that, far more than any punches thrown by Ballmer or Gates or Schmidt, will determine which titans prosper.
[tags]software business, business press[/tags]

Deep packet inspection and the new ad targeting

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It’s not hard to understand why people got upset with Facebook over “Beacon,” the company’s effort to track what its users do on the Web and auto-transform those actions — like buying products or tickets to a movie — into messages broadcast over a personal network. Who wouldn’t be creeped out, at least sometimes, by this transmutation of private transactions into public statements?

But Facebook is just facing the same pressures all tech companies encounter when they find they have to deliver on sky-high valuations for investors and markets. Facebook, and the people pouring money into it, now claim the company is worth $15 billion. Expect plenty more “monetization” gambits.

I’ll remain wary, but I won’t be surprised. Instead, I’m keeping my eyes on a different, and far more troubling, violation of Web norms: it’s called “deep packet inspection.” That geeky phrase hides a world of potential ill.

All Internet messages travel as packets of data. Packets have headers; they’re like the addresses on envelopes, and service providers’ routing equipment uses the headers to make sure messages get where they’re going. Deep packet inspection (DPI) involves looking at the content of the packet as well — it’s the equivalent of the post office opening your envelope, or the phone company listening to your call. Internet service providers use DPI for security purposes. It’s usually been discussed in the past as a tool that enables ISPs to limit Bittorrent use or other peer-to-peer filesharing activities; it is also what would enable various schemes being bandied about for creating “fast lanes” of privileged types of Internet communication. The debate over such schemes is well-advanced.

But now, it seems, hardware companies have begun producing devices that enable service providers to use DPI to target ads. The Wall Street Journal covered this topic last week here. And that, to me, is just way over the line.

I don’t want my ISP looking at how I use the Internet to target ads to me, period, any more than I want the phone company listening in on my conversations in order to sell me stuff.

I’m sure we’ll hear that the DPI-based targeting schemes are a Big! New! Benefit! in providing us with more relevant ads. But I’d rather be the steward of my own personal information than let a service provider make decisions for me. We’ll also hear that privacy-minded users should just find a service provider that suits them. But how can we make an informed choice about service providers unless they are forthright about telling us exactly what they’re doing with DPI, in words everyone can understand? In many communities, high-speed Net service is a monopoly, anyway.

Then we’ll hear that this is no different from the way Google’s Gmail scans your messages to target text ads to you. But Gmail has tons of competition. And Google’s accumulation of personal data has begun to raise privacy concerns as well — so saying “Google does it too” doesn’t exactly provide full ethical cover.

This issue sits at the heart of the Net neutrality debate, and it comes at us in a form that is more easily understandable to the everyday user than its previous manifestations. “Packet inspection” may be unintelligible to non-geeks, but anyone can understand why you don’t want the post office opening your mail.
[tags]deep packet inspection, net neutrality, ISPs, targeted advertising[/tags]

Kapor’s early bet on the Net

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This season, Mitch Kapor is delivering a trilogy of lectures on “Disruptive Innovations I Have Known and Loved” at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I missed number one, which covered Kapor’s role in the early years of the PC (podcast audio is here). Wednesday evening I made it to the second lecture, which focused on the rise of the Internet, and particularly the early, pre-Web Net era — the time when the Internet was considered a hopelessly geeky backwater for Unix heads and the golden road to the future lay with outfits like Prodigy and Compuserve and AOL. (The third lecture, on virtual worlds, is on Nov. 28.)

I first heard Kapor speak on this topic in the summer of 1993, at the Digital World conference in Beverly Hills, where, amid a throng of cable executives and Hollywood honchos and telco bureaucrats, he was the only speaker to make the then-fringe-y claim that the Internet offered a better model for the networked future than the “Information Highway” then being touted as an inevitability. His concern — one that resonated with me at the time — was that we try to create something better than “500 channels with the same crap that’s now on 50,” some system that would not only be open to corporate entertainment and commerce but would offer “a migration path for the weirdos and the outsiders to get into the system, mature and blossom.”

Kapor’s espousal of the Internet in those days was part of a wider activist portfolio; he’d cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation only a few years before. But it also stands as one of the more accurate acts of long-shot prophecy in technology history. At his talk Wednesday, Kapor looked back on that time and filled in some of the details of his own role.

He’d joined The Well early on, in the late ’80s (a year or two before I did), and “lost the next two weeks of my life” absorbed in the online conversation. A bit later the Well gave its members Internet access, making it one of the only ways that members of the general public could connect to that network. Around then the National Science Foundation began an aggressive project to open the Internet out to the public and to private businesses. In 1992 Kapor was spending a lot of time in Washington doing EFF work and got to know the founders of UUNet, which was one of the first firms to resell Internet connections to other companies.

“Why,” Kapor asked, “wasn’t this an obvious investment?” He tried to interest John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, but Doerr “wouldn’t take the meeting.” Kapor himself ended up putting some of his own money into the company. He provided no details, but it must have been a lucrative move: UUNet went public in 1995, shortly before Netscape, and was gobbled up in an accelerating series of acquisitions that made it part of Worldcom, in the days when people thought Worldcom was taking over the known universe. (Today what’s left of Worldcom — after a storied detour through the courts and various name changes — is part of Verizon. Full timeline here.)

My recollection of those days — when I was a recent immigrant to technology journalism from the arts — was that, much as I rooted for the Internet-style future as a healthier one for our culture, it was awfully hard to see how anyone was likely to make money via such a system. Kapor said he looked at the open network’s advantage in generating innovation and encouraging participation and concluded, “I think this is the one that’s going to win.” He was right.

It’s incredibly useful to keep that era in mind today, I think, because it provides not just a heartening saga of the triumph of free expression and open participation, but also a clear case in which those ideals were more practical, too.

The Internet’s victory over the services we now derisively dismiss as “walled gardens” was an instance, within recent memory, when the idealists weren’t hopelessly outgunned by the cynics — when, in fact, the idealists turned out to be the realists, and the cynics took a bath. That’s worth keeping in mind as today’s tech industry — powered by Google’s success and enthralled by innovators like Facebook — races through yet another cycle of debate over what “open” really means.
[tags]mitch kapor, uunet, lectures, berkeley school of information, internet history[/tags]

Remixing news: A river runs through it

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News organizations spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort deciding what “leads” — what goes on the front page; what goes in the newscast at the top of the hour; what’s important. This is how professional news organizations deploy the minds and time of some of their best-paid and most experienced employees: They sit down at daily meetings and argue this stuff out; sometimes they agonize over it.

In the era of scarce column-inches and broadcast time this made a lot of sense. But that era is fading. With the Web reshuffling how the most avid users of news get their information, editors’ roles are changing — not vanishing, but definitely being challenged.

These thoughts are occasioned by Dave Winer’s new experiments remixing the New York Times. A while back he offered us the Times River — a simple reverse-chronological list of “head-and-deck” links from the newspaper’s RSS feed that is perfect for scanning on mobile devices or just checking in to see what the latest Times stories are. In his latest rethinking of the flow of Times headlines, Winer has built an outline-style interface to the same set of headlines, built around the Times’ own keywords.

These pages are notable for their simplicity. There are no distracting ads, no complex navigational tools, no typographical elegance or design flourishes. It’s just the text and you. A part of me looks at this and thinks, “How crude.” Another part of me looks at it and sees the same spare utility as the original Google home page — and wonders if, a handful of years from now, I’m going to prefer keeping up with my Times this way over continuing to kill trees with my lifelong (but now imperiled) newspaper consumption habit.

Years ago, during the dotcom mania, as Salon’s home page got more and more festooned with stuff that Salon was playing around with to try to increase revenue, a software developer did something similar with our news flow — he “screen-scraped” our headlines and presented them in an ultra-simple list form. (His script still appears to be running but it no longer works properly — Salon’s home page has been redesigned a bunch of times since then.) This was a kind of proto-Salon River. Use of it never spread beyond a tiny handful of geeks. If it had — if hordes of Salon users essentially defected and said they preferred that version of our home page to our own — it would have presented us with a business dilemma.

But I think the real resistance to this new vision for news delivery will be less on the business end (business tends to extract some kind of value anywhere large numbers of people can be congregated) than in the newsroom itself. Because the whole “river of news” approach, like the “newest posts on top” design of all blogs, takes a big bite out of the editor’s job. The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

I think that there are still plenty of readers who like what editorial judgment adds to the arrangement of the news. Of course, they don’t always agree with it, and many like to argue with it. But they want their quick scans of the news to be ordered by something besides chronology, so they choose a publication to make a deal with, saying, in effect, “I’m giving you my attention and you tell me what you think is important. If I disagree often enough I’ll move on, but in the meantime, tell me what you think matters.”

The real question over the next decade or so will be, how many of those readers are there? Is it the vast majority — which is what most editors believe? Or is it a shrinking tribe of news consumers who grew up under the old dispensation?

Although most professional editors will immediately dismiss the scenario, I think it’s quite possible that the “editors’ cut” of the news will dwindle in importance until we hit some threshold where the majority of users decide they don’t want their thinking “arranged” for them.

At that point, the “river” will roll right across the front page. And some editors may need to find other outlets for their talents.
[tags] future of news, editors, dave winer, river of news, times river, new york times[/tags]

Commerce or communication: the Net’s double-chambered heart

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Nick Carr on 8/31/07, writing about the effort to change how the Internet domain system’s “WHOIS” records work:

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net’s heart — the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved — or not resolved — will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.

Carr’s succinct (and I think accurate) anatomy of the couer d’Net caught my eye and echoed something just beyond my memory’s grasp. Then I realized, right, this is very much the same dichotomy that I wrote about a long time ago in one of the annual “state of the Web” pieces (from October 1996) that I used to write for Salon:

Two very different groups are emerging with different ideas of how to drive the Web forward: call them the information peddlers and the community builders. The former see the Web as a conduit to distribute information and sell products on a few-to-many pattern; the latter see it as a place to exchange information, many-to-many — to yak.

Not only does this tension between what Carr calls “a platform for commerce” vs. “a forum for personal communication,” or what I called “the information peddlers” vs. “the community builders,” remain prevalent; it is a fissure cutting right through the center of what we’ve come to call Web 2.0.

Here’s a link to the full piece, headlined “After the Gold Rush.” Yes, we were saying that the Web gold rush was behind us. In 1996.

NY Post: Go online, end your career?

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From the “Did they actually write that?” dept., in Keith Kelly’s NY Post media gossip column (via Romenesko):

Not everyone who was spared in the Business 2.0 meltdown is going to Fortune.

Erick Schonfeld, who was an editor-at-large based in New York, has decided to end his 14-year career and jump to Michael Arrington’s influential blog, TechCrunch.

“It’s true,” said Schonfeld, “I’ve accepted a position to be co-editor at TechCrunch.”

“There was a ‘Schindler’s List’ [of Business 2.0 staffers who would be spared] at one point, but I took my name off it so I’d be eligible for a severance package,” he said

Mr. Schonfeld, as someone who left the comforting rituals of the print world for the wilds of the Web many years ago, I can assure you that career continuation remains a possibility. But even at this late date, I guess, there remains the possibility that colleagues and peers will consider you to have fallen off the edge of the earth…

(Here’s Schonfeld’s post about his move.)
[tags]media, journalism, errors[/tags]