Davos Newbies

Andrew Leonard on Al Gore joining Kleiner Perkins:

So Al Gore is now a partner at Kleiner-Perkins, the legendary venture-capital firm. And according to Fortune Magazine, he’s thinking big!

“What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project, and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally.”

But at another point in the same article, Gore says “We all believe that markets must play a central role.”

O.K. What do the Manhattan Project, Apollo project and the Marshall Plan all have in common?

The “market” was not the prime mover in their success. The federal government of the United States conceived these projects, funded them, and changed the world by executing them successfully.

Incidentally, in my work people fling about the Manhattan Project with considerable abandon. I’m increasingly of the view that it is one of those extraordinary occurrences that is unique. There was only one Manhattan Project and all attempts to recreate that scale and achievement in such a compressed period of time are doomed to failure. I’m not against all grand projects, but the work of Leslie Groves, Robert Oppenheimer and others is sui generis.

I love this example from New Economist:

The Saturday Telegraph front page carries a rather alarmist lead story by Graeme Paton and Toby Helm: Middle classes abandon state schools Here are the first two paragraphs:

A growing proportion of middle-class parents are giving up on state education after 10 years of Labour rule by paying to educate their children in the independent sector, official figures have disclosed.

The scale of the exodus is shown for the first time in statistics indicating that many families outside the traditional fee-paying heartland of the South East are shunning comprehensives in favour of private schools.

So just how fast is this “exodus” from public schools?

Figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed that on average, 7.1 per cent of 11- to 15-year-olds were taught in independent schools in 2004. But by this year the proportion had risen to 7.3 per cent - a total of 232,620 pupils.

There was also a rise in the number of primary-school age children in private education over the three-year period, from 5.5 per cent to 5.6 per cent - a total of 199,030 pupils.

Yep, that’s an increase of just 0.2 or 0.1 percentage points over three years. So for 11-15 year olds that’s around a 1 percentage point increase in private school’s share every 15 years, and for primary-school aged every 30 years.

At that pace it would take 109 years for private school’s share of high school students to double (to 14.6% by 2116), and 167 years for the primary-school age share to double (to 11.2% by 2174). Even Methuselah would not have considered that an “exodus”.

The most innumerate piece of UK journalism I’ve read for quite some time.
Because a relatively high percentage of the professional class in London, where media is concentrated, go private, a lot of UK papers assume that everyone abandons the state sector in education (London private schools capture about twice the percentage of students as nationally – a small minority still). When I lived in London, my veins would pop out when I read this sort of stuff. Now – true confession – my children go to a private school which is proving wonderful. It does leave me with some residual guilt.

I thought we were past tired polemics about bloggers being a waste of time, but Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times pulls out all the hoary cliches:

Like anyone who spends much of his waking time on the internet, I know it is divided into two parts: the handful of sites that help you run your life, catch up on the news and listen to your favourite tunes – and the remainder, which is mostly inconsequential rubbish.

Ms Delahaye Paine said: “A new blog is created about once every two seconds.” That was in April. By now it is no doubt one every second. How many are read by anyone other than the blogger? How many are worth reading?

A few weeks ago, I heard the genome pioneer Craig Venter ask whether we remembered the story about how monkeys, given keyboards and endless time, would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Well, he said, the internet shows it is not true.

As far as I’m aware, tens of thousands of professional journalists over the last 150 years have also failed to produce anything approaching Shakespeare as well. That’s neither here nor there. Fortunately, however imperfectly, the FT recognizes the value of blogs, with more springing up on its site all the time. And people with eyes to see at One Southwark Bridge (and I know there are some there) can see that there are many blogs that outrun business newspapers on particular topics: think Brad DeLong, Tyler Cowen, Calculated Risk, etc, etc.