Dana Blankenhorn

Obamacare Beyond Obama

The Affordable Care Act is based on one assumption and three corollaries. The assumption is:

There can be no unlimited draw from a limited pool

The three corollaries are:

1. Everyone gets into the pool, and everyone has skin in the game.
2. Technology will show the best practices, and best practices should be followed.
3. Competition is good.

The third corollary was put in by Republicans, whose allies have spent the last six years disproving it in their attempt to tear down the other corollaries and, in the end, destroy the Obamacare system.

Competition is good, but its aim is to win, and the prize for winning is market power, which the rules dictate must then be used on behalf of shareholders. Great in theory, but in practice inherently messy, and as subject to corruption as any government-run system.

Once this election is over we’re going to all face the problems of Obamacare beyond Obama, because we’re all getting older. Americans aren’t doing it as fast as Europeans or Asians, thanks to immigration, but we’re all doing it, each one of us.

Journalism is Dead

That’s what everybody says. The profession I’ve made my living in since 1978, and have made my life, no longer exists.

It died of a business model, they say. Advertising no longer pays the bills, and the damned readers refuse to pay like they did “back in the day.”

This is nonsense. Readers never paid for journalism. What they paid was the cost of getting the paper from a printing press to their front door, or into their hands at a newsstand. The printing, the paper, and the workers were always paid from the advertising in the paper, and due to the high costs associated with printing and distribution, editorial only got 8% of the budget anyway.

With the Web, most of those costs disappear. You no longer need the printing press. You don’t care about paper costs, or ink costs. All you need is a Web site, and there you get to take advantage of cloud economics. Reach and frequency are free.

No. If journalism is dead it is because it has lost its function, its true reason for being, no matter what lies they told you in journalism school.

Journalism is about making markets.

Educating Trumpistan

On most issues the politicians representing TechLand are right and those of Trumpistan are simply wrong.

It’s not that Trumpistan lacks answers. The trouble is they don’t know the questions. Trumpistanis believe a politics of nativism, populism, and militarism can save them from the forces of change battering down their suburban splendor. They can’t, because politics had nothing to do with it. What is happening is that the same technological forces that built those suburbs now demand new economic structures, built around software and research, and the need for trained minds to be in constant contact, 24-7 rather than 9-5.

Bankers and insurance agents, the middlemen who held the country together through the 20^th century, are no longer needed in the 21^st. They’re like John Henry, the steel-driving man. They’re coal miners, they’re auto workers, they’re ditch diggers, they are in the way, and they are being replaced by machines.

Civics for the Techland Age

One thing I learned in my studies of history here is that industries go through natural political cycles of rising, ruling and falling, which define the politics of each succeeding generation.

Manufacturing rose during the Progressive Era, ruled during the New Deal era, and fell during the era of Nixon. Oil rose during the New Deal era, ruled during the Nixon era, and is falling now during the Obama era.

The same pattern holds for technology. Technology rose during the Nixon era, and now is its time to rule. That is not a fate it can escape. The alternative is too dismal to contemplate, continuing political domination by industries and people antithetical to tech’s interests, like the Koch brothers, whose money comes from energy and manufacturing.

As an industry rises, what it most wants from government is to be left alone. As it rules it first wants to eliminate other interests’ interference in its progress, and then seeks to maintain that control in defiance of larger economic trends. That’s what is behind the larger political cycles of American politics, and it has been since our nation’s founding. The business of America remains business, and that is at the heart of our global leadership. Lose that and we fail. So does everyone in this country.

So 2016 is a very important year for technology’s leaders. For people like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who have become wealthier than anyone can imagine during this decade, now is the time to step up.

That doesn’t mean writing a check. There are important issues that they need to become far more deeply involved in than they are. There is a political agenda to be defined and pursued.

Life After Trump

Donald Trump is not going to become President.

America has not surrendered to tyrants, or would-be tyrants, for 225 years. We are not about to start now. There aren’t enough angry white men in the world to elect him.

The question is what happens to the anger that he generated? We have several examples of that in American history, and none should leave you sanguine.

The most peaceful outcome was what happened in the last turn of the cycle, from manufacturing to oil. War in the 1970s became our chief economic export, but it was at least kept far away. The domestic objections, the anti-war crowd, generally left politics after 1972, gradually accepting their role in opposition, suffering the “hippie punching” that distinguished our politics right until the next crisis, in 2008.

World War II followed the 1932 crisis, beginning first in China, then erupting in Spain, before engulfing the world. World War I came in the wake of the 1896 crisis, preceded by a decade of American imperialism, while Filipinos died, Columbians saw their country broken, and Theodore Roosevelt became the first great avatar of American imperialism.

Also, the Civil War, which began right after the 1860 election.