James Drogan

Look at and think about the following chart taken from John Mauldin's Thoughts from the Frontline Weekly Newsletter of November 26.

Now America has become a service economy and those jobs do not show here, but the growth of government has, it would seem, gotten out of hand.

Paul Krugman posts this morning, The Instability of Moderation, a short piece reminding us that to get out of the ditch, it's helpful to know how we got into the ditch.  Krugman's brief reprise of economic history reminds us how important is to understand history.

I also read yesterday a related article in The New Yorker, What Good is Wall Street?  I would be remiss in not pointing out the subtitle is, "Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless."  I wonder whether a child confronted a parent with the lines, "It says here what you do is socially worthless.  What about that Dad?"

Which leads me to ask whether you will like what you become when you grow up?

By in large, except in affairs of the heart and other undertakings where emotion rules, I think the world is deterministic.  Where you are is largely the result of where you have been and the decisions you made along the way.  Where you will be is largely determined by where you are now and the decisions you will make hence forward.  One can't always see the outcomes, but one can prepare for a series of likely outcomes.  For example, knowing that you face a certain decision, knowledge of what others have done when faced with a similar decision is information of value.  Where does that information reside?  In history.    

In Bizz School Re-Thinking 6/19/5 I made mention of the gap hypothesis that had emerged from my involvement with CUNY via Baruch in November 2003.  The hypothesis is that the gap between what academia produces and what business wants is constantly increasing.  In the blog post to which I have provided the link above I concluded:

Rather than pointing fingers, academia and business ought to come to the realization it is in their common interests to work together to resolve the issue. The combination of academically qualified and business qualified teachers is a must. The trick in all this is to somehow prevent class warfare.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has taken up the same issue in Bridging the Gap between Business and Government.  He, like I, seems to be searching for the motivator that will prompt academia and business to to collaborate to close the gap.  This is not, by the way, to say that none of this is going on.  The MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics Partnership Program is an example of collaboration of the sort that I and, I think, Wladawsky-Berger have in mind.  Fair disclosure:  I had a relationship with this program during my career at IBM.

I wonder, however, if the gap is not self-perpetuating given the different missions of academia and business. 

So, to my friends in academia and business alike, I remind you we are in this together and, quite likely, more progress can be made if we work together than if we wander around, occasionally bumping into each other.

In 1914, John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, addressed the first session of his two-year lecture course as follows:

“Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies that (will) form a noble adventure…Let me make this clear to you. ..nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”

 From The Big Picture.



"Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses."

From Quotes of the Day.