To your point about creating profit by hiding risk, I think we're about to find out exactly how much of the endless efficiency and redundancy reduction of "hot scheduling" and "just in time logistics" was essentially stripping away the ability to survive ANY kind of gentle hiccup in the American economy.
Stability has been taken for granted for so long in this country, in ways that simply isn't true everywhere. The worst things people can imagine are either self-created economic problems, like 07/08 recession, or 9/11 or Katrina, or Sandy. MAYBE the fuel crisis in the 70s?
Those were all bad, and harmful in their own way, but either contained, or internal to the economy - the recession was an economic shock - but also fixed with economic tools of governance.
We don't have generations of people who have first or second hand memories with nationwide-crisis: civil war, coups, HUGE natural disasters, pandemics, etc. That's exactly the kind of experienced leadership that could say "hey, 'Just-In-Time logistics' are a great re-branding of 'absolutely fucked if there are quarantines or roadblocks', we're not doing that", or "cutting staff and then hot scheduling so that we can tolerate exactly 1 employee on sick leave is a terrible idea."
In engineering, there is a concept called "safety factor", which is basically how many times the expected stresses/loads/forces/etc do you design for your bridge/plane/car/rocket/circuit etc to be able to handle. AFAIK. Inefficiencies in workplaces, redundancies often act as hidden "safety-factor", so that a business could operate under 2 or 3 times the given supply chain "stresses", etc.
Management consultant has essentially become ways of taking materials away from that bridge over time and rebranding it as brilliant management. Eventually you get to absolutely perfectly efficient machines that operate flawlessly under expected conditions but under 1.0001x the expected load, they collapse.
Right now Congress needs to fund a Legacy Braintrust which pays the old machinists/engineers/ manufacturers etc. to come out of retirement, share their legacy knowledge, offer their advice on how to get manufacturing going. First up should be gov funded pharmaceuticals and med supply manufacturing.
(This piece is from 2010, but he started his crusade earlier. He got endless ridicule from the neolib crowd at the time, so it's a great shame he isn't with us today. Not to mention the shame that no one listened.)
Back in the day, I lived through the kind of "scale up" process he talks about. It can be a uniquely beautiful thing -- even while being exhausting and excruciatingly uncertain. I've also been in the worst of environments more recently. Your brief observation about the productive interaction of labor, engineers and academics made me think of one of the most palpable differences between the two experiences: In the *productive*, "build something that lasts" experience, the lines between the three roles were incredibly blurry. Valuable ideas came from all over, and were appreciated by all. I'm an Ivy League Ph.D., have worked in prestigious research labs, and was once recruited by the NSA. But I've seen some of the coolest ideas come from "labor" guys. OK, maybe not janitors, but guys who use shop tools.
Technically, there was "management" back when I came out of grad school, but they were facilitators, not "bosses." And the management career path was not the only "success path."
1) Yes!!! to this: "We don’t let the people who do the work have any say over how or whether the work is done."
2) The two Bobs seemed to be a notable improvement over current management. I think it's time to stop demonizing them.
3) "As one put it, “Man, there’s a lot of meat on the bone here!”" - good gracious, what a horrible analogy. Live animals create more animals, and are otherwise worth far more than the mere meat on their bones.
4) "and corrupted our universities" - I've never heard from a University the importance of negotiating your wage in a job offer, yet for some reason they expect us to have enough money that we can donate money back to them?
On the short-term side of things, there are two issues. The first is liquidity, which means markets have time to ingest information and re-price. That is occurring; not pretty, however, we should remember we are approaching (only) 12-month lows - and the last 12 months had some questionable multiple expansions.
For some classic irony, watch the CNBC guys assure people that "We know the banks are good because of the stress tests" ... yup, the same guys who complained about the new regs and capital requirements a few years ago ... ...
The second issue is watching the few industries that could turn from dumpster fires into forest fires. We should not confuse these two. (For example, Chesapeake and Occidental were self-made problems and should not be rescued - or even helped - by the USG.)
And if we (taxpayers) need to rescue some folks, we should drive a harder bargain with equity and bond holders to ensure - and this is the magic of capitalism - that companies do not re-create the same vulnerabilities in the future (since the consequences are clear).
How Should America Handle the Coronavirus Crisis? -> I don’t have much to add on pandemic medical response. So, basically, you're just ranting because the Trump Administration is handling cv as well as or better than any other developed nation and that just doesn't fit your very narrow world view. Even Gavin Newsom of all people isn't fighting reality on this one. As for the econ points, you should actually listen to Trump. We're way ahead of you.
The forgotten factor in the survival of Main Street during this downturn is the landlord.
Local retail could survive a downturn if the landlords ever gave a little relief....the local store or club or restaurant may have a dive in sales, but if the landlord would forgive an equal proportion of the rent, we might not lose our local fill in the blank.
When in doubt, I blame Reagan. Seriously, in this case, his praise of the RJR/Nabisco deal sent an awful signal. Crippling a company in order for top management to make a quick windfall was at least as legitimate as managing a business for profits and the long haul. One can see how well that’s worked out for the average person.
More germane: Knowledge has been belittled and devalued since — again — Reagan. For our leaders, public and private sectors both, there’s no upside in knowledge. Back a few months, Boeing was the great example. Merged with a company where cutting corners to save pennies was the culture then put the takeover company in charge. More recently, of course, is Trump’s CDC debacle (or worse, of course). Another great example constantly getting worse is Pentagon procurement. There, there’s more money for arms companies in having troubled development which increases costs but at the Pentagon’s (our) expense.
So we can’t make stuff for little better reason than our leaders see no benefit in maintaining the ability to do so.
At the end, nearly all of us will survive this. But the ones who’ll really screwed and never made whole will be small businesses.
To your point about creating profit by hiding risk, I think we're about to find out exactly how much of the endless efficiency and redundancy reduction of "hot scheduling" and "just in time logistics" was essentially stripping away the ability to survive ANY kind of gentle hiccup in the American economy.
Stability has been taken for granted for so long in this country, in ways that simply isn't true everywhere. The worst things people can imagine are either self-created economic problems, like 07/08 recession, or 9/11 or Katrina, or Sandy. MAYBE the fuel crisis in the 70s?
Those were all bad, and harmful in their own way, but either contained, or internal to the economy - the recession was an economic shock - but also fixed with economic tools of governance.
We don't have generations of people who have first or second hand memories with nationwide-crisis: civil war, coups, HUGE natural disasters, pandemics, etc. That's exactly the kind of experienced leadership that could say "hey, 'Just-In-Time logistics' are a great re-branding of 'absolutely fucked if there are quarantines or roadblocks', we're not doing that", or "cutting staff and then hot scheduling so that we can tolerate exactly 1 employee on sick leave is a terrible idea."
In engineering, there is a concept called "safety factor", which is basically how many times the expected stresses/loads/forces/etc do you design for your bridge/plane/car/rocket/circuit etc to be able to handle. AFAIK. Inefficiencies in workplaces, redundancies often act as hidden "safety-factor", so that a business could operate under 2 or 3 times the given supply chain "stresses", etc.
Management consultant has essentially become ways of taking materials away from that bridge over time and rebranding it as brilliant management. Eventually you get to absolutely perfectly efficient machines that operate flawlessly under expected conditions but under 1.0001x the expected load, they collapse.
Right now Congress needs to fund a Legacy Braintrust which pays the old machinists/engineers/ manufacturers etc. to come out of retirement, share their legacy knowledge, offer their advice on how to get manufacturing going. First up should be gov funded pharmaceuticals and med supply manufacturing.
Hard to find much missing in your CLIMB analysis. And yet I think it's worth re-reading what Andy Grove had to say about this more than a decade ago:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grove-how-america-can-create-jobs
(This piece is from 2010, but he started his crusade earlier. He got endless ridicule from the neolib crowd at the time, so it's a great shame he isn't with us today. Not to mention the shame that no one listened.)
Back in the day, I lived through the kind of "scale up" process he talks about. It can be a uniquely beautiful thing -- even while being exhausting and excruciatingly uncertain. I've also been in the worst of environments more recently. Your brief observation about the productive interaction of labor, engineers and academics made me think of one of the most palpable differences between the two experiences: In the *productive*, "build something that lasts" experience, the lines between the three roles were incredibly blurry. Valuable ideas came from all over, and were appreciated by all. I'm an Ivy League Ph.D., have worked in prestigious research labs, and was once recruited by the NSA. But I've seen some of the coolest ideas come from "labor" guys. OK, maybe not janitors, but guys who use shop tools.
Technically, there was "management" back when I came out of grad school, but they were facilitators, not "bosses." And the management career path was not the only "success path."
Regarding the skills part, industry used to do a lot of their own training. Maybe a return to this arrangement ought to be encouraged.
1) Yes!!! to this: "We don’t let the people who do the work have any say over how or whether the work is done."
2) The two Bobs seemed to be a notable improvement over current management. I think it's time to stop demonizing them.
3) "As one put it, “Man, there’s a lot of meat on the bone here!”" - good gracious, what a horrible analogy. Live animals create more animals, and are otherwise worth far more than the mere meat on their bones.
4) "and corrupted our universities" - I've never heard from a University the importance of negotiating your wage in a job offer, yet for some reason they expect us to have enough money that we can donate money back to them?
On the short-term side of things, there are two issues. The first is liquidity, which means markets have time to ingest information and re-price. That is occurring; not pretty, however, we should remember we are approaching (only) 12-month lows - and the last 12 months had some questionable multiple expansions.
For some classic irony, watch the CNBC guys assure people that "We know the banks are good because of the stress tests" ... yup, the same guys who complained about the new regs and capital requirements a few years ago ... ...
The second issue is watching the few industries that could turn from dumpster fires into forest fires. We should not confuse these two. (For example, Chesapeake and Occidental were self-made problems and should not be rescued - or even helped - by the USG.)
And if we (taxpayers) need to rescue some folks, we should drive a harder bargain with equity and bond holders to ensure - and this is the magic of capitalism - that companies do not re-create the same vulnerabilities in the future (since the consequences are clear).
How Should America Handle the Coronavirus Crisis? -> I don’t have much to add on pandemic medical response. So, basically, you're just ranting because the Trump Administration is handling cv as well as or better than any other developed nation and that just doesn't fit your very narrow world view. Even Gavin Newsom of all people isn't fighting reality on this one. As for the econ points, you should actually listen to Trump. We're way ahead of you.
The forgotten factor in the survival of Main Street during this downturn is the landlord.
Local retail could survive a downturn if the landlords ever gave a little relief....the local store or club or restaurant may have a dive in sales, but if the landlord would forgive an equal proportion of the rent, we might not lose our local fill in the blank.
When in doubt, I blame Reagan. Seriously, in this case, his praise of the RJR/Nabisco deal sent an awful signal. Crippling a company in order for top management to make a quick windfall was at least as legitimate as managing a business for profits and the long haul. One can see how well that’s worked out for the average person.
More germane: Knowledge has been belittled and devalued since — again — Reagan. For our leaders, public and private sectors both, there’s no upside in knowledge. Back a few months, Boeing was the great example. Merged with a company where cutting corners to save pennies was the culture then put the takeover company in charge. More recently, of course, is Trump’s CDC debacle (or worse, of course). Another great example constantly getting worse is Pentagon procurement. There, there’s more money for arms companies in having troubled development which increases costs but at the Pentagon’s (our) expense.
So we can’t make stuff for little better reason than our leaders see no benefit in maintaining the ability to do so.
At the end, nearly all of us will survive this. But the ones who’ll really screwed and never made whole will be small businesses.