Bernard Avishai's Blog

Bernard Avishai Commented on Connected Cars: The 'Killer App' For The Smart Grid--And The New Driver of Growth by Bernard Avishai

2009-11-05T06:18:28Z

I suggest you read my article, and look particularly at the Oak Ridge Study. The point is not how much power, but how it is distributed. But you knew that, right?

Bernard Avishai Commented on Connected Cars: The 'Killer App' For The Smart Grid--And The New Driver of Growth by Bernard Avishai

2009-11-05T06:11:35Z

Many good points. The critical one is the (now) preeminence of Asian suppliers in making power-dynamic components. This is certainly true, but my point is that the nature of the competition does not give an advantage to Asian suppliers owing to labor costs. The competition is on know-how, where American entrepreneurs can at least assume a (more or less) level playing field. Also, many of these supplier companies (I mention LG Chem and Yazaki) are just as likely to open manufacturing facilities in the US, to be closer to assembly, since the labor content of components is so small. We need to shake off some old assumptions.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Connected Cars: The 'Killer App' For The Smart Grid--And The New Driver of Growth by Bernard Avishai

2009-11-04T14:41:43Z

Look, Spider, you are (thinkingly) missing the point. Gen-1 technologies are just that. All components are going to get better and cheaper. Compare the first cell phones to what we have now, or the first laptops. The question is, do we finally have an electric car that (given the price/performance advantages over gas, and a good-enough solution to the "range extension" problem of all fully electric vehicles) has a chance to cross the chasm to a mainstream market; and given others getting into the act, what will be the consequences for the grid? I think the answer is clearly yes, and so do the various start-ups that are betting their lives on it. Get 100,000 miles out of a battery and save at least 10 cents a mile--do the math. But 8 years from now, the electric car will be a new iPhone compared to an original iPod. what The GM team that is working on the Volt should not be confused with the ancien regime. If the mother corporation folded, their intellectual property would attract plenty of investors.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Palestine Economy: Update by Bernard Avishai

2009-11-04T11:42:42Z

Dan, this is a shrewd question, and (as I say in my article) probably maps to Bibi's vision, but your working assumption underestimates the savvy and national purpose of Palestine's business leaders. If they could be "bought off" they'd be living elsewhere, where (among other things) their children would not want to emigrate.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Palestine Economy: Update by Bernard Avishai

2009-11-03T16:01:55Z

"A scenario reminiscent of certain areas of Berlin in 1933."

People, what's going on here? Is Israeli = Nazi the only formula TPM Cafe readers can come up with today? This kind of thing makes it harder for people like myself to report, because you make it easy for you-know-who to say that critical reports about the occupation play into the hands of people stridently opposed to Israel's very existence, which, by the way, even my friends in Ramallah are not.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Palestine Economy: Update by Bernard Avishai

2009-11-03T15:46:43Z

BluePearl (he yawns and rubs his eyes), but why are pulling your punches. Tell me what you really think.

Bernard Avishai Commented on The Law Of Return: 'Oh Learned Judge!" by Bernard Avishai

2009-10-30T15:28:51Z

Look, there is a more important point here that is not simply personal. It is that democratic countries can have national characters in certain legal ways and not in others. There is nothing 19th. century about wanting to preserve one's language and the culture it subtends. The question is how, which our Zionist watch-dogs cannot really grasp. This debate is long overdue, and not only for Jews.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Goldberg: The Last Word (At Least From Me) by Bernard Avishai

2009-10-23T11:53:36Z

Dan, I am not sure what I write here is really meant only for Jews about Jews, though I should have worked harder to show why. Anyway, I just returned from Poland, and feel passionate that the question of how nations survive in political forms, how they treat minorities, how democracies adapt to the contradictions,how demagogues use claims of patriotism to undermine the standards of civil society--all of these things--are universal questions that have plagued us for a couple of hundred years. Still, I find you consistently fair minded and agree that when we speak, we should understand who is in the room. I apologize for the implication that non-Jews may have nothing to contribute here. After all, I am not Catholic but feel brotherhood with Jim Carroll and his struggles. I would want to know that you could feel this way about mine, and I should have taken the time to earn your consideration.

Bernard Avishai Commented on J Street And World Order by Bernard Avishai

2009-10-20T08:24:16Z

AnnaA,
I take your question seriously, though I am not sure it was meant this way. The US can give people in Ramallah a political horizon, a provisional border, and the promise to gradually get the IDF out of the way of their businesses. I lay the latter issues out in the October "Harper's," if you haven't seen this.

Bernard Avishai Commented on J Street And World Order by Bernard Avishai

2009-10-19T17:16:33Z

MJ, thanks, and I think you are right. You just have to visit campuses to see how the tide has turned, though it is always one simplification replacing another (now it is the one-state solution). I can't believe Michael Oren does not see this; that he cannot stay aloof from the one group in the country that resonates with what American foreign policy will become over the next generation.

Bernard Avishai Commented on J Street And World Order by Bernard Avishai

2009-10-19T13:09:52Z

Thank you for this comment. In a way, you stated what was in the back of my mind when I wrote this. We are all going to need a spine strengthened by strategic clarity moving forward.

Bernard Avishai Commented on The Outlines Of The Mentor State by Bernard Avishai

2009-10-06T10:53:01Z

Dan, I'm traveling and cannot do justice to your many thoughtful comments. I am sure we could enjoy drinks someday. The point of my posts was not to invite a rehearsal of all the old arguments in favor of commonwealths regulating markets. I have made clear often enough that do not think markets self-regulating and remain a "Canadian" in the search for the balance you spend much energy reaffirming. The question is how to deliver this balance: through government agencies and bureaucracies or through new alternative ways that exploit the very new technologies that make this blog space possible. We live in an age when every public good, from newspapers to universities, are being reinvented. So, too, does the commonwealth need to be. If the government can mandate standards, and unleash competitive entrepreneurial ventures of all kinds without sacrificing the efficiencies we once got from government's scale, why would we not welcome the change?

Bernard Avishai Commented on Unemployment Or Unemployability? A Story. by Bernard Avishai

2009-10-02T13:20:03Z

Look, Dan (and others), we all love Marx's 1845 manuscripts. (I actually did my doctorate on the implications of the Grundrisse.) I take for granted, what even Adam Smith did, that the world of exchange value is a narrow and artificial world, in which the things we really care about are marginalized (or, to quote the young Marx, inverted). I am not saying we should love the market, for God's sake. But there are many reasons to be skeptical of purely socialist alternatives. And as long as we advantage ourselves of what markets provide--especially technological progress and certain freedoms--we have to understand what the technologies really imply: the ways they work with democratic hopes. Dave's garage is a horror as compared with More's Utopia, where everyone is secure in their skills, nobody makes things others stop wanting, and every day means spiritual solidarity. But Dave's his garage is a lot better--for him, and our democracy--than what he would have faced if the world were still dominated by the mass production technologies I grew up in, from car assembly lines that were 50% "labor," to dealer and Jiffylube dominated repair. Paul Sweezy once said, back in the 1960s, that mass production, "monopoly capitalism," was a world in which it cost a million dollars to ask a question. Today it costs virtually nothing. And were it not for our own Dave, i.e., Josh Marshall, how many of us would be publishing our ideas to thousands of people?

Bernard Avishai Commented on Unemployment Or Unemployability? A Story. by Bernard Avishai

2009-09-30T21:17:33Z

My point, precisely, is to get "progressives" to take into account changes in the workings of a market society when they think about solutions. Aside from the personal attacks--which are, let us say, creative--many of the responses to Dave's story, particularly from Destor23, have been automatic.

I am not saying people without education deserve to be poor and abandoned. Deserve has nothing to do with it. Nor is diagnosis contempt, though it is often confused with it: AIPAC, after all, thinks people who analyse the deficiencies of Israeli democracy are just attacking "Israel." I am saying that work that is repetitive, which used to provide a livelihood for people without education, will not do so on the future--at least not in factories, etc.--owing to fascinating and pervasive technological changes; that these changes can actually be thought good by people with democratic imagination, for it means work, more and more, invites intelligence and growth, as with Dave, not mutilating in the classical sense that Charlie Chaplin skewered.

Nevertheless, these changes mean an unprecedented crisis for people without education or the poise to deal with flux. To ignore systemic changes is to ignore all kinds of things, from the velocity of business cycles (which I wrote about last year), to the best ways to deliver a public health option (which I wrote about last week). We cannot be reasonable about solutions if we resist seeing how this new commercial ecosystem works.

We need the commonwealth to invest massively in the education and cultivation of our young people. We need the state to think of ways to help engender entrepreneurship and cosmopolitan values.
We cannot "stimulate" ourselves out of this crisis, though (as I've also written here before) we may need many "big digs" for a long while. We need the state to help qualify us as producers, not just qualify us as consumers. We need, that is, Obama and his call for responsibility, over and above healthcare and daycare and schools and universities and summer camps. Romanticizing the "security" of the old capitalism gets us nowhere. I shall try to flesh out some of these ideas in subsequent posts.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Unemployment Or Unemployability? A Story. by Bernard Avishai

2009-09-29T17:40:48Z

Dan, I have worked on an assembly line. Is this what you do, when not doing math and writing lovely comments? I suspect not.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Unemployment Or Unemployability? A Story. by Bernard Avishai

2009-09-29T16:04:58Z

This is the great question. First, a million new little business can create as may jobs as 60,000 big ones, though many less jobs for people who cannot bring their heads to work. Second, what seems to be happening, in places like Silicon Valley, is that prosperity in the information economy creates service/servant jobs. But, on the whole, a transitional generation will face serious problems. A mentor state will have to do what Obama has done: rebuild infrastructure and schools with massive, job-creating investments: many big digs.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Cooperatives: The Best Public Option by Bernard Avishai

2009-09-09T22:49:51Z

Gee, you sure know how to hurt a guy.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Cooperatives: The Best Public Option by Bernard Avishai

2009-09-09T22:48:28Z

Effective competition can come from regional coops if--and this is key--premiums are subsidized for people who are otherwise not insured. Why not expand existing coops and let them network among each other. Why not local boards responsible to coop members? Why top down and not bottom up, so long as care is universal, is based on best practice? It is like the charter school model, as opposed to one-big school system. The point is, you no longer have to be big to get the advantages of scale. That's what's new. Look at TPM.

Bernard Avishai Commented on Cooperatives: The Best Public Option by Bernard Avishai

2009-09-09T22:40:13Z

Dan, Medicare (which just paid for my wife's bunion surgery) is not constituted to lower costs. It is the "fee for service" wet dream. It could change things, if indeed the bi-partisan outside we've heard so much (and which Krugman and others endorse) insists on best practice. But then seniors might not "like" it so much. Anyway, the idea that you need the scale of Medicare to negotiate lower cost provision of service is a half-truth. You don't need a single system to get the benefits of scale; you can develop consortia. And the limitation on services requires regulations to restrict providers to good outcomes, as Gawande writes, not just buying power.