I seem to sniff a bit of an inverse relationship between population growth and GDP per capita, along with wealth, however that one was calculated...
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Is America losing it?
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I seem to sniff a bit of an inverse relationship between population growth and GDP per capita, along with wealth, however that one was calculated...
Fitzcaraldo215
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Economics was my undergrad major, so the idea that it is not a science comes as news to me. But, yes, it is focused on certain specific aspects of human behavior.
Here is the Wiki:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics
Yes, I understand the difference between a science which is focused on human behavior and a physical science, having studied both. Some would argue that only the latter is true "science", but I beg to disagree.
OP
svart-hvitt
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Dallas,
to clarify (I am sorry this post is going to be long but I feel there's a need to get some misunderstandings out of the way):
It is not a hypothesis of mine that American industry has lost something. That's a fact which is documented in the MIT PIE report.
Then I go on and ask if what we've seen in American industry as a whole may be applicable, relevant for the audio industry as well. I think this question is relevant even if it's an inconvenient question. Hence my question if America has lost its leading position in audio. To call this my "personal screed against the U.S." is out of line. I take it as an indication that my question is inconvenient to you.
You list AES articles by American authors as evidence that America's audio industry is in its best shape. I am afraid you miss the point. The point of the MIT report is to signal that high-level work needs to be supported by lower-level hands-on production capabilities. Here's an interesting story from the report:
"None of PIE experiences in the field were more powerful in concretizing that fear than the visit we made to one of our own colleagues’ laboratories. When we went to the basement laboratory in MIT Building 35 of Professor Tonio Buonassisi, a leading researcher on solar cells, he walked us around the lab pointing out all the leading-edge equipment that came from tool makers located within a few hours of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Much of the machinery had been made in close collaboration between the lab and the instrument companies as they handed ideas and components and prototypes back and forth. Used for the first time in the lab, these tools were now being marketed to commercial solar companies. Buonassisi was worried. The news on the U.S. solar industry was looking worse and worse as the economy stalled, as stimulus spending on renewable energy ended, and Chinese competitors hung in, despite losses and low margins. It looked bad for the local companies Buonassisi worked with. And as Buonassisi thought about it, he saw that the collapse of his equipment suppliers would mean real trouble for his research, for he relied on working with them to make new tools faster for more e cient and cheaper cells. Even in a fragmented global economy with instant connection over the Internet to anywhere in the world, the ties that connect research in its earliest stages to production in its nal phases remain vital".
You also fail to see that academic articles may not be a leading indicator of industrial strength. To support my point, take a look at this list of Japanese Nobel laureates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_Nobel_laureates
Before 2000: 5 laureates in the hard sciences
After 2000: 11 laureates in the hard sciences
Japan was long accused of lacking innovation. Then they started to win lots of Nobels in the hard sciences. But most of the Nobels came after the fact, i.e. after Japan had become a nation of industrial excellence.
In other words: High-flying academic papers need support from an "industrial ecosystem" to become more than just ideas, and academic articles and achievements may come long after the ascending nation(s) became industrial leaders in their fields.
My gut feeling that the MIT report is relevant for audio as well, was strengthened just a week ago when we read that Harman Professional is to lay off 650 people. The idea is to consolidate central positions. This is somewhat a déjà vu of this passage from the MIT report:
"These holes in the industrial ecosystem are ones that have been hollowed out by the disappearance of large numbers of suppliers under pressure from global competition and by the disappearance of local capabilities once provided by large corporations as part of their own business operations".
Is Harman about to be hollowed out? Is Harman a window into the American audio industry as a whole?
Then we have in fresh memory the M i v e r a case, where an amateur seems to believe that industrial excellence can come into being simply by importing parts from all over the world to be assembled locally. Because he lacks basic industrial training he makes lots of mistakes easily spotted by those who have experience. I think this example illustrates how big a gap there is between armchair engineers and those who have extensive industrial training and experience, from R&D to production.
Lastly, I feel the need to build and support my case for using the MIT report in an ASR thread. This is a summary of the background of the report:
"In one such previous moment, at the end of the 1980s, MIT’s President Paul Gray had asked faculty members from across the specialized disciplines of the Institute to work together to analyze the causes of slow productivity growth and industrial stagnation in the United States and to propose new approaches for private industry, government, and universities. The book the group wrote was Made in America, and it became a landmark in public debates about the U.S. economy. With that legacy in mind, in 2010 MIT President Susan Hockfield launched the MIT Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) research group. Twenty faculty members and a dozen students joined. The objective was to analyze how innovation ows from ideas through production into the economy. The point of departure was recognizing that innovation is critical for economic growth and for a vibrant and productive society".
The MIT report is, in other words, a cross-disciplines project. The PIE project aimed to be a "landmark in public debates about the U.S. economy". So I thought it would be relevant as a starting point for an audio industry related discussion on ASR as well. I would be very surprised if the report is irrelevant to audio. It's not correct, as Dallas does, to call the MIT work "a journal paper". It's much more. Think about it: 20 faculty members working on a joint project with the support of the MIT management. To round this off, let me show you the names of those who participated in the report:
PIE Commission
CO-CHAIRS Suzanne Berger, Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science Phillip A. Sharp, Institute Professor and Professor of Biology
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Olivier L. de Weck, Associate Professor of Engineering Systems and Aeronautics and Astronautics
Daron Acemoglu Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics
David H. Autor Professor and Associate Head, Department of Economics
Mary C. Boyce Ford Professor of Engineering and Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering
Claude R. Canizares Vice President and the Bruno Rossi Professor of Physics
Charles L. Cooney Robert T. Haslam (1911) Professor of Chemical Engineering and Founding Director, Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation
David E. Hardt Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Richard K. Lester Japan Steel Industry Professor and Head, Department of Nuclear Science & Engineering
Richard M. Locke Class of 1922 Professor of Political Science and Management, and Head, Political Science Department; Deputy Dean, Sloan School of Management
Fiona Murray Saro m Family Career Development Professor,
Associate Professor, Management of Technological Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Sloan School of Management
Paul Osterman Nanyang Technological University Professor, Professor of Human Resources and Management, and Co-Director, MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, Sloan School of Management
Michael J. Piore David W. Skinner Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, Departments of Economics/Political Science
John S. Reed Chairman, MIT Corporation
Elisabeth B. Reynolds Executive Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center
Donald Rosenfield Senior Lecturer, Operations Manager, Sloan School of Management; Director, Leaders for Global Operations
Sanjay Emani Sarma Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Director, MIT/SUTD Collaboration O ce, Lab for Manufacturing & Productivity, and Director of Digital Learning
Martin Arnold Schmidt Professor of Electrical Engineering and Associate Provost Charles G. Sodini LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering
Edward Steinfeld Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director, China Energy Group
7 . A PREVIEW OF THE MIT PRODUCTION IN THE INNOVATION ECONOMY REPORT
ADVISOR William B. Bonvillian Director, MIT Washington O ce STAFF Anita Kafka
PIE COMMISSION RESEARCHERS
Jonté Craighead Civil and Environmental Engineering Radu Gogoana Mechanical Engineering (graduated 2012) Jesse D. Jenkins Technology and Policy Program
Joyce Lawrence Political Science
Florian Metzler Technology and Policy Program (graduated 2012) Jonas Nahm Political Science
Hiram Samel Sloan School of Management
Andrew Weaver Sloan School of Management
Rachel Wellhausen Political Science (currently Assistant Professor, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin)
PIE COMMISSION STUDENT ASSISTANTS
Victoria Del Campo Daniel Naeff Andrew Oswald Samuel Packard Darci Reed
Briana Sell
watchnerd
Grand Contributor
Who cares about audio?
It's a mature industry, and a miniscule portion of the economy. Most of the important discoveries are decades old. It's all about incremental improvements now.
I really don't care what country makes the audio products I choose to buy, as long as they're high quality. They're just consumer goods. They're a miniscule portion of the economy.They're not very important to the advancement of human society, as opposed to advances in energy, AI, or health, for instance.
I'd much rather have US engineers working on things that matter like quantum computing, instead of getting really good at building a better woofer. Let the Scandinavians dominate the high-end driver market, just like the Swiss have watches.
P.S. The PIE report group is underwritten by Lockheed Martin, who very much have a vested interest in advocating for the importance of domestic manufacturing as part of the military industrial complex.
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I'm never keen on this idea of trashing arguments just because of who is making them. Are the arguments in the report sound or not? If they are so weak that they can only be justified on the grounds of who is making them, they are not worth very much. But if they are strong, it doesn't matter who is making them.
watchnerd
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I didn't say the arguments weren't sound.
But this report has existed in various forms (updately frequently), including the book mentioned, since I was in college in the early 1990s. It has a perspective that aligns with the business and political interests of the sponsors, namely that manufacturing is of outsized importance to an economy (as opposed to financial or technology services, agriculture, health care, entertainment, tourism, etc). It's something to be aware of, much like medical papers sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, food companies or, once upon a time, tobacco companies.
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Fitzcaraldo215
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Agreed. Interestingly, one area where US R &D plus manufacturing has a huge and growing advantage over the rest of the world unlikely to ever be overtaken is offensive and defensive weaponry. Not surprising given the huge sums we perpetually spend on it.
OP
svart-hvitt
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Your line of reasoning makes the books of Floyd Toole suspect because he worked for Harman when he wrote them. Do Toole’s books just reflect «the business and political interests of the sponsors»?
Many of the articles of AES are written by people working in a company in the audio industry. Should AES articles be discounted as marketing?
U.S. universites receive grants from donors, often big business (financing chairs, institutes, faculties etc.). Does this practice mean that what comes from these professors and schools is just marketing for a certain set of interests?
You are, however, not the only one arguing that the «free market» leads to academic production of little value:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3635035.html
(Professor Mirowski argues that academic value deteriorates when the academic world is reduced to a marketplace for ideas).
I think your way of reasoning is like choosing the easy way out of a debate where you cast doubt over the proponent’s arguments (in this case MIT, which is the world’s most highly regarded university in the hard sciences) instead of discussing the arguments per se.
Dismissing MIT as being in the pockets of Lockheed Martin is a bit extreme in my opinion.
PS: I will continue to use Toole as a source in audio science and not go by your logic and disregard his arguments because he worked for an audio company.
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watchnerd
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You're actually taking it to an extreme.
As I pointed out, I didn't say the arguments are unsound. I said, however, they have a perspective on the importance of manufacturing that aligns with the sponsors; that perspective is far from universally shared amongst economists.
Toole's research, even though sponsored by Harman, has been subjected to peer review and validated - easier to do in the hard sciences. In contrast, the authors of the PIE do not have universal consensus on their studies, it's hard to validate (it's economics), and they have been crying the alarm bell about the death of American innovation since the early 1990s -- when they were proven sharply wrong by the growth of the information age. In fact, they're so wrong that they have to now account for the fact that the IT industry somehow breaks their rules - designed in USA, built elsewhere, seemed to work.
In any case, it's all moot as audio is neither a highly important national industry nor one that is critical to innovate in, which is the real thrust of the PIE report and its predecessors.
As I said earlier, it does't matter if the USA is 'behind' in audio. It's a miniscule slice of the economy, of no particular importance to national security, health, economic growth, or productivity improvements.
In fact, in the spirit of Ricardo's Comparative Advantage, one could argue that a low-value sector like audio is exactly the kind of thing a high labor cost country like the USA should be outsourcing to other countries.
So let's posit that, yes, the USA is "losing it in audio' -- so what if it is?
The USA "lost it" in the manufacture of mechanical watches, too. And it was of no importance.
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Definitely not lost it as far as manufacturer and innovation of beer goes , even the beer that Was conceptualised in the u.s but made abroad ( like in the uk) is great.
Does anything else really matter ?? .. no I thought not.
watchnerd
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It's been interesting to move to Washington, where the number of beers for sale in the stores is no greater than California, but there are far more brewpubs that don't ship at all and have beer menus that change weekly! And growlers to fill and take home.
OP
svart-hvitt
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One point in talking about losing it in audio is the metaphor of industry being like an ecosystem. It doesn't benefit the ecosystem if the biggest animals and plants survive while the smaller ones go into extinction.
America runs a big trade deficit. The nation is indebted. Luckily, foreigners own debt in dollars, whose value the U.S. can manipulate at will.
I believe you're victim of a version of "not seeing the forest for the trees", part from the fact that I argue that the forest needs tending as well.
In a world where the nation's debt and trade balance are irrelevant, one shouldn't care about an "industrial ecosystem", but such a world doesn't exist in the long run even for a country that enjoys the privilege to print the world’s standard fiat currency.
I tend to side with the "spirit" of the MIT report. I also like the writing of people like Ralph Gomory, a significant person behind IBM and America's biggest research efforts within the "new economy". Here's an example of Gomory:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~rgomory/writings/DoesOutsourcingCreateJobs.pdf
In other words, I think most economists are wrong on the innovation and trade issue. Consequently, I think MIT is on to something. And I think some anecdotes in audio support the hypothesis that America is losing it when it comes to industrial innovation and capacity.
I always found this Lincoln quote interesting:
"I know this much. When we buy manufactured goods abroad we get the goods and the foreigner gets the money. When we buy the manufactured goods at home, we get both the goods and the money".
People have long forgotten that America's industrial ascent was built on protectionism, not unchallenged free-trade.
Lastly: Your defense of Toole (one person) and critique of MIT (the world's premier school of the hard sciences) seems to me like you pick the facts that suit your case when you base your case on the idea that for example Toole is more trustworthy than MIT.
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I loved the Mumford brewery downtown LA , they have no regular brews he just innovates and brews what he wants. So it's a ever changing menu.
I love that, it's exciting and in its own small way brave and shows great confidence too.
All the ingredients of innovation and signs of a healthy industry and a open minded and exploratory customer base. his beer is also well balanced and thought out ( I call it 3 dimensional beer, expressive flavour, great texture and a developing after taste sensation all in balance ) and not the type of cheap seat extremist sour or bitterness for the sake of it some fall into.
I like chocolate.
I will always give you my last square.. promise. ( if your within arms reach)
watchnerd
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A) MIT is a great hard science school, but the PIE report isn't hard science, it's economics. And MIT, while a good school in economics, is not necessarily the best (I'd probably rate Chicago higher due to the number of Nobel laureates, Fama, French, the Black Schoole equation). And even if the study came from Chicago, that doesn't somehow guarantee the study would be flawless.
B) I'm not critiquing MIT. I'm critiquing the authors and their conclusions. You're effectively saying that the research shouldn't be critiqued because it came from MIT? That's laughable and not how science works.
C) The linkage between innovation and manufacturing matters for....manufacturing. We're in a world of software defined HW now, where an outsized portion of the value chain isn't even in the hardware.
The manufacturers in this graph are left with the low margins of contract manufacturing, while Apple scoops up the profit, much of it derived for the value created by the software ecosystem.
Large portions of audio are similarly moving to a software-defined architecture (JBL M2, for example).
So, in effect:
1. The PIE report isn't flawless in its conclusions, especially in industries driven by software / information innovation
2. Audio is advancing quicker on the software side than the hardware side
3. It doesn't matter if the USA or Belorussia or Zambia is leading the audio innovation curve -- it's a niche industry
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