Dana Blankenhorn

This Ain’t the 70s

I came up in the 1970s, the era of stagflation.

I was fortunate to be spared the worst of it. I lived most of the decade around Rice University. While everyone else in America was suffering, Houston enjoyed a boom. I didn’t drive regularly until I got a job that paid for it, in 1978. Even then I was young enough to bike everywhere. Houston is flat and youth can dodge cars.

Despite my penny-pinching, and that of my dear wife, the house we eventually found was less affordable than houses are today. This was because money cost money, a lot of money. We paid 12% interest, adjustable every 6 months. We half-expected to be paying 15% in three years.

By the 1980s inflationary expectations were built-in to the economy. Everything was expected to cost more because raw materials, starting with oil, were so dear. Stagflation meant a stagnant economy wracked by inflation.

Tech Demands Freedom

America dominates the global tech economy because freedom.

The freedom to think what you want, and be who you want, is now the key to economic growth.

This is a point that’s widely ignored by American elites today. Americans love to talk about what’s wrong and have overestimated our global adversaries since 1776.

It’s most obvious now in our economic competition with China.

China is a great manufacturing power. But it continues to trail in software and science. It deliberately put down its Cloud Emperors for threatening the state. It can’t deliver the latest semiconductor technology.

Software is the product of hands and minds. You can’t automate its production, the way you can a car. You can improve productivity with better tools. But organizing a team requires that coaches listen as well as speak. Man management, they call it.

The best scientists, coders, and writers are all motivated by something inside. We’re not doing it for the money, we’re not doing it for an ideology. We each have our own reasons. In my case, it’s a desire I’ve had all my life to be heard, to be seen, to be part of the conversation. If you want to get the most out of us, you must respect that. China’s government doesn’t respect that.

Spoiled Rotten

When I was a kid in the 1960s and my late mother was mad at me, she’d say I was “spoiled rotten.”

Looking back, I was. So were most people of my generation.

We still are.

Our privilege as Baby Boomers makes us assume everything should be perfect all the time. When it isn’t we complain bitterly.

Right now, America is in the best of all possible worlds. We have the world’s strongest economy. Our unemployment rate is below 4%. COVID is in retreat.