In an unscheduled appearance, former US President Bill Clinton appeared at the Aspen Ideas Festival yesterday afternoon and talked about jobs, the debt ceiling, and Medicare.

On jobs, he pointed out that 3 million jobs are posted for hire, but are being filled at about half the rate of previous recessions.  It’s important to bring back construction and manufacturing, not just service jobs.  Banks need to lend and companies need to borrow to accelerate this.  IT was the job growth engine of the 1990s, but not now.  In the 2000s, jobs could have come from the energy sector but there was a lack of investment in alternative energy, and this was a lost opportunity.

In the 2010s, President Clinton seemed to feel that the US is even less well-placed.  Many people have swallowed the GOP message that government is the problem, while corporations feel no responsibility towards the state, only their shareholders.  Business schools have certainly followed Friedman in teaching this view, stressing the claims of fiduciary responsibility, while in the US and much of the Western World, corporations are increasingly treated as persons under the law.

The debt ceiling debate was clearly a source of ire.  Congress has already voted to incur debt by spending money, so how can it now refuse to raise the ceiling?  (more…)

This panel addressed a critical issue in US foreign policy, namely how do we promote freedom in closed societies?  The Aspen Ideas Festival assembled a highly distinguished panel to address this issue: John Negroponte, Jane Harman, and surprise guest Sir Nigel Sheinwald, UK Ambassador to the US.  The moderator was Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post.

John Negroponte asserted that America has always stood for freedom in the rest of the world, at least since Woodrow Wilson.  Furthermore, the direction of history is towards ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy,’ as Francis Fukuyama says.  FDR, anxious not to repeat some of the mistakes of Wilson after World War I, used Bretton Woods to create institutions like the IMF to promote financial stability.  Today, the best thing that America can do is ‘foster a secure and prosperous international system.’  (One wonders if Wall Street ever got this memo.) (more…)

Some of the most interesting, provocative and salient quotes we heard around the Aspen Ideas Festival from the media professionals:

“Social media is the first draft of history. Traditional media is the second draft.” - Orville Schell

“The power of social media is not in the individual; it’s in the sheer number of witnesses — people who can help verify information and participate in the news gathering process.” - Vivian Schiller

“We’re about to hit our 100 millionth comment. People don’t just want to consume the news anymore. They want to comment on it, share it, pass it on. It’s a very different experience. Self expression has become the new entertainment.” – Arianna Huffington

“The failure of journalism is quite often the failure of imagination — to see what’s in front of us and how its changing the country and how we can document it and explain it.” - Joe Nocera

“If I had a pie in the sky dream it would be that the US had a manufacturing policy. My proposal to grow the economy is to figure out high tech manufacturing.” - Joe Nocera

“Employment is not just the result of Adam Smith and the invisible hand – it’s about fiscal and social policy.” – Chrystia Freeland

“We’ve moved from an investing society to a trading society.” – Andrew Ross Sorkin

“Ideas are great — as long as there’s action too.” Kai Ryssdal

After several days of financial angst and counter-terrorism, I made time today to attend two musical interludes at the Aspen Ideas Festival that I found to be very restorative.

“The Global Breadth of Cuban Music” featured Orlando “Maraca” Valle and his band in a session that was part lecture, part concert.  Integral parts of the Cuban sound, particularly rhythm, were explained and demonstrated.  The main unit of rhythm is the clave, with song forms like son, rumba, and timba all having different claves, each admitting of many variations and embellishments.  The audience was encouraged the clap the basic figure while instrument upon instrument layered on pattern after pattern, until it was hard to tell where the bars began or ended.  The sheer complexity and ingenuity of the resulting structure was exhilarating, making you want to laugh out loud.  Musicians tend to be capable in many instruments, so the rotation of band members can add yet another layer of richness to the proceedings.

“School of Rock” by Graeme Boone (part professor, part DJ) took us on a lightning tour through the world of rock ’n’ roll, from the Beatles to Nirvana to Danger Mouse and beyond.  Taking syncopation from jazz, scales from the blues, and even discords from modern classical music, rock ’n’ roll went through a modernist period of innovation in the 50s and 60s that ultimately settled into a ‘common practice’, albeit with disruptive excursions, such as punk rock, which attempted to break the mold.  We are now living in a post-modern period in which remixes, re-recordings and multiple directions seem to be the norm.  Music is as likely to be created using a computer, rather than by wrestling with a real instrument, thanks to technological advances in music software, giving composers a richer palette of sounds, timbres and textures than ever before.

These two sessions reminded me how essential music is to the human soul, or at least to my soul.

Peter Jackson is chief scientist and vice president of Thomson Reuters, where he’s been since 1995. He has built a group of 40 research staff with expertise in the areas of document search, text and data mining, and machine learning. Jackson is also responsible for university collaboration with respect to joint research projects. His most recent book, Natural Language Processing for Online Applications, came out in a second edition in 2007. From 1992 to 1995, Jackson taught post-graduate classes in artificial intelligence and parallel computing at Clarkson University in New York and was a visiting professor at Singapore Polytechnic. In 1988, he moved to the US and became a principal scientist at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories. Before coming to the US, he taught in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University from 1983 to 1988 and wrote the textbook Introduction to Expert Systems.

 

In an Aspen Ideas Festival session titled “Will Clean Tech Take Our Economy to the Cleaners,” Dr. Kristina Johnson, former under secretary of energy at the US Department of Energy and CEO of Enduring Energy debated with Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment, the benefits and costs of clean tech.

Johnson laid out five proposed actions to take to achieve an ambitious goal of 83% reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050 and 80% clean electricity by 2035:

1. Focus on energy conservation first.
2. Decarbonize the electric sector.
3. Electrify the transportation sector.
4. Develop advanced bio-fuels that can be used for work trucks and planes.
5. Modernize the grid for energy efficiency

Johnson says there needs to be more public and private focus on research in battery technology and research in converting to bio-fuels. She also says the citing and permitting process for renewable energy sources like wind and solar and hydro power need to be streamlined; that the US needs to continue a loan guarantee program for nuclear; revitalize our infrastructure; and she called for more regulation.

The cost of not pursuing such a plan according to Johnson?

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Robert Rubin, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly of the Clinton administration, was interviewed by Chrystia Freeland of Thomson Reuters at the Aspen Ideas Festival this morning. Rubin stated that the US is at a ‘historic crossroads’ and that the ultimate challenge is political, not technical.  Washington needs to address the debt crisis, finance public investment, and reform education and healthcare, but ideology and opinion are getting in the way of facts and analysis, and the media isn’t helping much.

Political analysts often focus on structural issues, such as gerrymandering and campaign finance, but Rubin suggested that the media needs to play a larger role in educating the electorate, as well as airing scandal, conflict and ideological issues.  People don’t understand the trade-offs; if they did, they would hold their representatives more accountable.  Meanwhile, politicians could learn from other countries on topics like education and employment, and starting trying out ideas instead of arguing.

At question time, Rubin said he was ‘really worried’ about the current impasse over the debt ceiling, and thought the situation was ‘horrendously risky.’  Making the debate about debt a debate solely about spending, is completely wrong, in his view.  If the deficit is greater than discretionary spending, how can you cut your way to a balanced budget?  The issues have not been framed properly, and there is no sensible discussion.  I find it hard to disagree.

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The full title of this session with Thomas Friedman (and his latest book) is “That Used To Be Us: How America Lost Its Way in the World It Invented and How We Come Back.”  The leading phrase is taken from a speech by President Obama concerning economic progress in China (better rail system and the fastest supercomputer).  The interview was conducted by Walter Isaacson of president and CEO of The Aspen Institute.

Friedman began by talking about the American Dream, and how “its future is now in play.”  Americans can no longer assume that each generation will be better off than the one before, while our deteriorating infrastructure suggests things may actually get worse.  He sees the possibility of a slow decline, and worries that Americans are getting used to second best.

Friedman then declared that the health of America is important to the stability of the world, in that it provides global governance.  (“We are the tent pole that holds up the world.”)  To my mind, this veers dangerously close to American Exceptionalism, although Friedman explicitly said later in the talk: “I am not an exceptionalist or a declinist, I am a frustrated optimist.”  (As a British citizen of a certain age, I am familiar with exceptionalism and the blinkered world view that goes with it.)

No one can deny that America has made exceptional contributions on a global scale, but one wonders if the world would come to an end if the US became the second or third best economy.

Friedman stated that the US now faces four significant challenges:

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Some of the most interesting, provocative and salient quotes we heard around the Aspen Ideas Festival today:

There’s a real government desire in China to move from “Made in China” to “Invented in China.
- David Schlesinger, Chairman, Thomson Reuters China

“A lot of the new issues we’ll need to address in this century are: cyber-terrorism, climate change and pandemics. We cannot solve any of those issues alone or with military power. We have to use our soft power to work with others to address those. Sometimes soft power is power over others — but sometimes it’s power with others.”
- Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

“Change is constant. Context is variable.”
- Chris Luebkeman, Director for Global Foresight + Innovation at Arup

“Have a bias for action.”
- Rye Barcott, author of It Happened on the Way to War

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
- Albert Einstein quoted by Linda Tischler, Senior Editor at Fast Company

 

 

 

 

In developed economies, we certainly take the venture capital/start-up mindset as a given. You come up with a novel idea, infuse it perhaps with some intellectual property, even develop a prototype – and then it’s off to pitch in Silicon Valley, Boston, London, Stockholm, or any number of places around the world. If someone likes your idea, you get your money and away you go, perhaps to create the next Foursquare, Tweetdeck, or Square payment system.

This afternoon, I listened to the stories being told in the Global Entrepreneurs and the Emerging Markets panel discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival and came away with a clear takeaway. Funding for startups in emerging markets continues to be a significant challenge.

In fact, the quote that stuck with me from the session was this: “VC money is usually family money.” A lecturer from Stanford University told a story of how he left on a sabbatical to create a startup in sub-Saharan Africa in the field of renewable energy. Amazingly, he was unable to get anyone in Silicon Valley to take part in the effort. Instead, he got all of the money for the startup from families in the

It really does speak to the importance of groups like the Acumen Fund – an organization that is dedicated to social impact investing. I was glad that someone from Acumen was in the room to speak up about their work and others like them.

While I can understand that the challenges emerging markets start-ups face are quite different from those in developed markets, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve allowed ourselves to become so focused on finding the next billion dollar valuation that we are missing an opportunity to make a bigger corporate and social impact in these regions through managed risk taking and social investment.

Bob Schukai is global head of mobile technology at Thomson Reuters, where he is responsible for overseeing the development and execution of mobile growth strategy across the organization. Prior to joining Thomson Reuters, Schukai was vice president of wireless/broadband technologies for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. from 2005 to 2010. During that time, he was responsible for global research and development activities in the areas of mobile/wireless, broadband, Internet protocol television, and games. Schukai also spent more than 18 years working for Motorola in the US and United Kingdom. In his last role at Motorola, he served as director of global 3G strategy and business development. He is a 24-year member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a technical and professional association of more than 365,000 individual members in approximately 150 countries.

 

 

The main questions addressed by this Aspen Ideas Festival panel yesterday was: Is Wikileaks legitimate journalism, and is it good or bad journalism?  The question of legitimacy was largely by-passed in favor of the good-bad issue, although the panel did circle back to discuss whether or not prosecution of Wikileaks (and any newspapers publishing leaks) was appropriate.  The panel consisted of James Fallows, Lawrence Lessig, Jeffrey Rosen, and Jonathan Zittrain.

There was some agreement about Assange’s recklessness in failing to distinguish between whistle-blowing and raw document dumps, and also with Rosen’s view that there is really no principled way to prosecute Wikileaks or the newspapers under the Espionage Act.

On the positive side, Fallows pointed out that Wikileaks does combat the general tendency in governments to suppose that people are better off not knowing what is really going on.  Yet the ‘nihilist’ position that ‘all should be open’ has obvious problems. (more…)