A designer friend was telling me about a conversation he had with investors in an electric car venture. They planned to source much of the manufacturing in China.
He argued it was important to build things in America.
We don't have to build it, we just have to be smart, they said. This meant, apparently, having a good design and finding the best, lowest cost suppliers around the world.
But, said my friend, you get a lot smarter when you build something. Those guys working on the assembly line figure out what really works and come up with better ways to do things. Now they work for somebody else — in China. Even if they don't apply what they learned to someone else's product or go off and start their own company, we lose that innovation. Our designers and other companies are less likely to meet that guy and others like him.
That's what I call MBA stupid.
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I'm slightly bummed that in my business, I don't have to make personal deliveries.
If I did, this might be my company car.
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Stephen Pearlstein is writing about health care, but the interesting preamble deals with the myth of small-business job creation. He cites two points that square with my own study of the topic.
[Most new job creation] happens in a small number of very fast-growing companies that are no longer what most of us would consider small. There are lots of reasons for the success of these fast-growing firms, among them the ingenuity and hard work of their founders, the availability of capital and a culture that celebrates risk-taking.
But the dirty little secret is that a lot of small-business job growth has also been driven by the decision of big businesses to outsource many tasks that they used to do in-house. In an economic sense, jobs haven't been so much "destroyed" and "created" as they have been shifted from one company to another.
[...]
After all, one reason small businesses "created" all those jobs in the first place is that they enabled big companies with generous health plans to outsource work to small companies that had lower cost structures because they offered no insurance at all. If simply requiring those small businesses to offer health insurance would wipe out that cost advantage and drive them out of business, then maybe those companies weren't the great engines of innovation and efficiency that they always claimed they were.
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Dane Smith writes about a new book by a Minnesotan that debunks the proposition that the more money we keep away from government, the freer we are.
“If freedom varies with the portion of our income we keep,” Handelman observes in the book, “then we were freer in 1900.
“Yet most of us, I suspect, would prefer the freedom we had in 2000 … The capacity to exercise choice is an important part of our freedom and there is no question that the number and quality of choices increased over the century … (And) that growth would not have been possible without significant investments in the public sector.”
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DJ Danielson is back at I Don't Hate America and asking good questions, such as why Michael Brodkorb felt it was OK to blog about politics while paid by the taxpayers, but not if he is also working for free as Deputy Chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota.
Is there something you feel you owe the rank and file of the Minnesota GOP in preventing a conflict of interest that you didn’t also owe the taxpayers?
Also via IDHA, soon to be former Gov. Palin thinks there's a "Department of Law"in the White House that keeps ethics-challenged occupants out of hot water.
