Capitol Ideas: Back to the Future
Bethell, Tom
by Tom Bethell Back to the Future Does more efficiency mean smaller profits? I remember, around 197o, wondering what the year zooo would be like and whether I would still be here. When you do...
...But she could have used a pencil...
...Take e-mail, for example...
...University libraries are one of the joys of life, but what will the Internet do to them...
...Okay, the cost of communication has gone down, the volume of trade will go up...
...Martin's Press...
...Meanwhile we're harried...
...I think what schools have learned already and what they don't dare talk about is this: Computer learning is good for one thinglearning how to use a computer...
...Then it would be laboriously retyped into the magazine's computer...
...By the way, if there's a computer that can scan the front section and turn the pages of the Washington Post at the speed of hand and eye, which takes a couple of minutes, I want to hear about it...
...There I will not follow...
...When you do that, you imagine the future in a very hazy, unfocused way, but at least it is different out there...
...Now here we are...
...As it happens, 197o was the year of Future Shock, a much hyped book by Alvin Toffler...
...And it wilt increase economic efficiency...
...People would be marveling...
...Someone in Cedar Falls, Iowa, was selling books over the Intemet in competition with Amazon.com...
...Book circulation must be down, and book budgets will surely plummet before too long...
...Glassman said he thought that profit levels indeed could go down...
...in New York, and an investment strategist...
...He had not been able to attract enough customers...
...Charles Krauthammer is playing chess in cyberspace...
...There are additional reasons for economic optimism, notably the waning faith in socialism worldwide...
...They in turn will tend to "compete away" profits...
...As far as I'm concerned, the online paper doesn't come close to the one delivered to your door...
...He reminded me of something the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a year ago...
...W. Seligman & Co...
...This is serious stuff: the end of the Old Economy as we know it, and the birth of a New Economy as we imagine it...
...Then again, maybe that is misleading...
...That surely would stop him in his tracks...
...In 192o...
...Now comes word that the Wall Street ]ournal's Ray Sokolov is reading Stephen King's e-novella in bed with a laptop...
...Today, we take a benign view of the new information technology, computers, and the Internet...
...That's what I didn't foresee...
...Although he was careful to distance himself from the neo-Luddites, Toffler viewed new technology as an intimidating thing that would have to be "tamed...
...It would be a huge saving, and it would actually be a help because these screens are encouraging the passive use of information...
...As Charles Kadlec noted in a Seligman commentary, tax-rate reductions are spreading throughout the world...
...Or is it all just play, period...
...Therefore, "we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate...
...The increase in competition is real," said Howard Segermark, executive director of the International Telecard Association in Washington...
...Sometimes it seems that the venerable Fed chairman keeps his eye on everything except for monetary policy...
...You mean I can throw away my keyboard...
...Here the scarce commodity may turn out to be people...
...It's all very well to talk of "the new digital democracy," as Time has done, and to say that every Website is one click away, but you might as well say that, in the Yellow Pages, your trickle of business is right next to the Amazon...
...And no one wants to steal it...
...Nonetheless, the digital revolution surely will upset many a going concern...
...Which reminds me, I find people admiring the palm-fitting "notebook" that I carry about...
...He is making the liberals very nervous, for a market plunge would hurt A1 Gore more than George W. Should we cheer Greenspan on...
...Time allowed that the "colossal bummer" is that "you probably need more money than ever just to tell people where to find you...
...I have kept up with technological change to date, and I am happy to find things online...
...imposes its own continuity to a greater extent than futurists ever imagine...
...So he keeps on tightening the money supply...
...Maybe we have concentrated too much on the cost side of the balance sheet...
...Cost...
...Its "spiral back" feature ensures that it lies fiat...
...It's a great invention, but sometimes I think: My God, the telephone became commercially available, when...
...He used the phrase "information overload...
...The horse-and-buggy, Model-T metaphor may itself be misleading because we know how that contest ended...
...As for that pencil, it often comes with a useful feature made of a raw material shipped from Sri Lanka...
...Kadlec, by the way, is the managing director ofJ...
...Alan Greenspan wants to triple the number of high-tech immigrants...
...In the end, though, it's all too new to assess...
...For these reasons, brand names will probably turn out to be more important than we realize...
...This too-solid flesh (and more of it every year...
...It only costs them $15o a month, and they can do it as a hobby...
...At the University of Texas at Austin, the New York Times reports, "circulation is down," and "turnstiles are moving at a slower pace...
...He is the author (with Kevin A. Hassett) of a book called Dow 36,ooo, published last fall...
...perhaps at the stage of maintaining a horse and buggy in the barn, with a still-unreliable Model T in the garage...
...You can sit at home and actually talk to someone hundreds of miles away...
...Why, even as I write, office workers are playing Solitaire and other computer games on the iob...
...Here is the D.C...
...It implicitly foresees a similar fate for hard copy and bricks and mortar...
...When people find it easier to speak to one another, they "do more business...
...And no doubt they will greatly simplify our lives-almost the opposite of what Toffier foresaw...
...I am less confident about the Dow lOO,OOO part...
...They fear the e-commerce competition...
...He argued that "change" was coming too fast for mere humans to absorb...
...65 cents...
...IN The American Spectator _9 May 2 o o o 17...
...Sure, costs go down when bricks, mortar, and bodies are moved to Nevada, but if distance is no longer a barrier to commerce, it is no longer a barrier to entry...
...Companies without profits don't normally take out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal...
...With no employees, and working out of his home, his expenses were little more than $15o a month...
...There is Ann, walking her dog...
...Five cents...
...You mean you don't have to type it out...
...But no one really knows what e-commerce is going to do, he said, because our experience with it has been too short-lived...
...If location no longer counts for much, and all have access to the Web, competitors will multiply...
...You can recognize the other person's voice...
...The notebook fits easily into a jacket pocket...
...When you read books like Future Shock thirty years later you are apt to think that "change" has been exaggerated...
...Many a sentence went like this: 'q!ae speeded up flow-through of situations demands much more work from the complex focusing mechanisms by which we shift our attention from one situation to another...
...What about e-commerce...
...And if profits go down, so ultimately will stock prices...
...Almost everyone thought that way at the time...
...All over the country, the gains must be huge...
...So much more work is beingdone...
...Anything you could do with a computer pedagogically you could do with a pencil...
...But if real reading is involved, I want it printed out, and bound...
...It was fabulous, because it was active...
...bus, lumbering up the hill, still belching smoke...
...From Japan to Canada and Germany, he wrote recently, "personal and corporate income tax rates are going down for the first time in more than ten years...
...The small adjustments brought by the new technology seem rather minor by comparison...
...Addresses, phone numbers, and general comments can be inscribed on its 60 sheets...
...What about revenues...
...1=oo...
...That has now changed (except that Tot~ BF.THF.LL is TAS's Washington correspondent...
...Well, I have been reading Charles W. Kadlec's book, Dow mo,o0o: Fact or Fiction, and I agree with him that we are seeing "a radical reduction in a physical barrier to commerce...
...Nonetheless, Segermark believes that the increase in volume will sustain profits...
...I do worry about libraries...
...For many, the sheer novelty of the Internet transforms work into play...
...Even if profits do fall across the board, because producers multiply, economic growth driven by the new technology will surely continue for some time...
...With a few quick strokes it can delete, or as they say "erase," entries already made...
...O kay, okay, no more horsing around...
...I have seen my daughter use the word processor to prepare for a test, and she will outline (she is now in college) everything she had coming up for the test...
...Like Segermark, he also thinks that profit levels may be unaffected...
...His latest book is The Noblest Triumph (St...
...Now I double as writer and typesetter...
...Who would have guessed, in 197o, that students a generation hence would become letter writers...
...I would add that this profusion of advertising and celebrity has in turn created an atmosphere of unreality and premature expectation around the whole subject of e-commerce...
...Imagine that we had e-mail all through the twentieth century, and then, in about 199 o, there was this amazing new invention, the telephone...
...Even with the free publicity...
...This upstart businessman had found that, to get discounts comparable to Amazon's, he had to order only five copies of each book...
...Ten years ago, when I wrote an article, it practically had to be hand-carried to the editors...
...He has adopted the strange belief that wealth creation is inflationary...
...In the library itself, students seem to spend much of their time using terminals for private email...
...That's why we see all these dot-com ads and celebrity endorsements in established media...
...More recently, however, Friedman wrote a second column saying that the Iowa man had gone out of business...
...Then again, maybe the torrent of academic rubbish, which has been flowing freely for a generation, will dry up...
...I live within a few hundred yards of the American University library, and for a modest fee I can check out books...
...The horse and buggy is still way ahead...
...What does a pencil cost today...
...So the next time your broker tells you that this or that Internet retailing stock is actually worth some crazy multiples," Friedman wrote, just think of all those new competitors out there, "eating away at the profit margins of whatever Internet retailer you can imagine...
...The students, I am told, increasingly work from computers in their own rooms...
...What does a computer cost...
...And he was making money...
...You have heard of Amazon, you know they won't just take your money and run, they offer added services, and so on...
...Just kidding...
...I asked the financial columnist James Glassman what he thought...
...And why is everything so much the same...
...The book was a marketing triumph, for it was a dull read-a carload of abstract nouns...
...nuclear power is feared much more than it was...
...Wal-mart is spending millions lobbying for taxation of the Internet-even though they are among the most successful retailers...
...Tom Wolfe applied a nice dash of cold water in a recent Investor's Business Daily Q & A. He was commenting not on the value of computers as such, but on the 16 May 2o o o _9 The American Spectator amazing faith that school teachers have placed in them...
...Glassman believes that stock prices are about one-fourth of their appropriate level, as opposed to Kadlec's one-tenth...
Vol. 33 • May 2000 • No. 4
