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May 24, 2004
Personal Democracy Forum 9AM Monday
Personal Democracy Forum
9AM Monday morning, May 24th. Reporting from the New School and the "Personal Democracy Forum," a Jerry Michaelski - Andrew Rasiej production. I'm surrounded by bloggers. Jeff Jarvis in front. Anil Dash, of Moveable Type, to my left. We're here to talk about the affect of the Internet on the politics game. Following, my stream of consciousness notes.....First Up: Former Senator Bob Kerrey, now President of the New School:
- the key issue for an administrator -- and for a campaign manager -- is whether "to relinquish control."
- "takes more effort to set up a government than it does to influence a government that already exists."
- talking about "open source briefing." "I promise you that on September 11th, the most important source of information he [President Bush] got was from television....still a presumption that 30 second television ads are important, "but, my God, George Bush just spent $70 million on negative ads and it hardly moved the needle."
- Is blogging good or bad? It's neither good or bad..."blogging is like gravity."
- "Say what you want about Drudge, but...by dint of his relentless work...he's become a credible source."
- Blogging will continue to be important. We still need to encode and decode with words. People who can write, and that's not a small thing, will be influential. But..." eventually we may not need to so much. More "I'm personally influenced by sound." Expects more video and sound.
The first panel: "New Tools and Dynamics...."
(Meanwhile, they're broadcasting the chat on a screen behind the panel. Between blogging and chatting, it's difficult to actually pay attention to what anyone is saying.
- Nicco Mele, webmaster for the Dean campaign: "the most extraordinary thing: people started posted pictures of their meetup...old ladies in Nebraska, people in NYC...this broad tapestry of America started to emerge from these meetup pictures...."
- Dave Pollack of MSHC, the agency of record for John Kerry's fundraising: must create a sense of urgency.
What works in terms of driving action or making an impact?
Afternoon panel: Joe Trippi and Senator Ron Weyden
- Weyden talks about his "Stand by your ad." Explains that "open-ness" and "transparency" is good, but require accountability. He plans to launch a "Stand by your ad 2" bill to deal with negative, deceitful Internet campaigning.
- Trippi talks about "going negative in the time of Jefferson. "How do you go negative on the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence?" Trippi asks? Turns out Jefferson's opponents "went around on horses and said Jefferson was dead."
- Kerrey: "I don't think most people have any idea the levels to which the system has sunk with regard to fund raising." The "corrosive, stench" of fund raising. It's not that Senator X receives money from some group on Tuesday and then makes a certain vote on Thursday. "I'm sure that happens, there's no doubt about it. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that we have an election on the first Tuesday of November. People sleep in on Wednesday, but on Wednesday the fund raising begins, and it doesn't stop, year in and year out."
- Joe Trippi: "I think that John Kerry is missing a big opportunity." He's showing up on his Harley, hang gliding. The whole tone of his campaign -- and it's not different from Bush's -- 'Look at my, I'm amazing.'"
- "Fundamentally, it is the money. It's the money stupid. We're buying our government back."
- He should say, "Look at you, YOU'RE amazing." The American people have not been asked to be involved in a long, long time. And a campaign that recognized that could light a fire...."
- "The retail politics today is not knocking on anyone's door. We took regular people out of the process."
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Posted by oliver at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2004
Don’t Call It “Outsourcing.” Lately,
Don’t Call It “Outsourcing.”
Lately, “outsourcing” has fallen into disrepute. To say “outsourcing” today is to conjure a vision of data entry technicians in Iowa being handed pink slips as their lower cost replacements don headsets and boot up servers in Bangalore. The term has somehow become synonymous with “exporting jobs.” As such, it has made the short trip from hackneyed business buzzword to hackneyed political buzzword, and whatever information content it once carried has long since been replaced by more emotional freight. Beneath the emotion, however, lies an idea worth revisiting, if not rehabilitating.“Outsourcing,” the term, arrived in the late 1970s, closely linked to the rise of information technology. It was part of the same etymological class as “downsizing,” “reengineering,” and “leveraging.” The verb-izing of American business-speak coincided roughly with the demise of the great, vertically integrated industrial conglomerates of the early 20th century. Companies like General Motors, with vertiginous corporate hierarchies, found that it no longer paid to try to do everything themselves. In a world of computers, high speed communications, and ever greater competition, smaller, more focused companies proved more competitive. Thus emerged “outsourcing,” essentially the yuppie, service economy term for “sub-contracting.” No doubt, if Adam Smith were still around, he’d simply call it “division of labor.”
One shouldn’t be surprised, given this, to discover that “outsourcing” is everywhere. Those working in American corporations today hardly question the fact that their 401-K plans are managed by Fidelity or Vanguard, or that their health care benefits programs are run by the likes of Aetna, or that the food in the corporate cafeteria is served up by a food service company. On the “value chain” of modern corporate life, the lion’s share of links today are outsourced. Much the same is true for our personal lives. From ordering take-out for dinner to hiring a house cleaner, to say nothing of buying our milk in cartons as opposed to by the cow, we all make our own daily outsourcing decisions.
For both individuals and for companies, such decisions involve trade-offs -- trade-offs between time and money as well as other, less quantifiable, considerations. Some, like Henry David Thoreau, find in greater self-sufficiency a greater sense of well-being. Others prefer to shed “non-essential” activities to focus on their “core competencies.” Determining where on this spectrum they fall, companies must decide whether sub-contracting for a service will improve or hurt their long term corporate health. Sometimes they choose wisely sometimes not.
We can all be happy, one imagines, that General Motors long ago gave up trying to make car radios and passed the job along to Motorola. IBM shareholders, however, may still be seething that the company outsourced to Bill Gates the problem of an operating system for the first IBM PC. What’s obvious about the outsourcing dilemma is that it is complicated, and certainly does not admit a universal solution.
One small point, however, can and should be made now with great clarity: the current furor around “outsourcing” is not really about “outsourcing” at all. It is about American companies switching from domestic sub-contractors for a product or service to foreign sub-contractors for the same product or service. In other words, it’s not so much about “division of labor” as it is “comparative advantage” -- the specific advantage in this case being the low cost of foreign labor. This explains why those following the debate in India often replace the term “outsourcing” with the more appropriate term “offshoring.”
Bursting the bubble of politicized buzzwords, sadly, does little to solve the underlying problem of American job losses. Words matter, though, because politicized rhetoric obscures rational debate. Adam Smith’s great enthusiasm for the division of labor came of his recognition that specialization delivered great leaps in productivity. The benefit of lower labor costs alone, when not accompanied by an increase in specialization, is somewhat less compelling and may prove shorter lived -- particularly as the cost of living in places like India and China begins to rise with the arrival of new income.
As we proceed deeper into the heart of this campaign year, then, we should be careful to choose our words carefully. We would be wise to discuss the meaning of “comparative advantage” and to debate the risks and rewards of “offshoring,” but we should leave the benign concept of “division of labor” and its latest formulation, “outsourcing,” quite out of it.
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Posted by oliver at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)