Megan McArdle: The Parallax View

From here in New Hampshire, the world looks different. A slight majority of the people I meet every day fall into the group of people who may have graduated high school, worked in the Shipyard (Portsmouth Naval) or on a lobster boat or on their dairy farm and the problem they have analyzing economic theory or political debate is they have no theoretical basis for thinking; they have only their own limited experience. When they start to talk about the proper role of government they start quoting, often unknowingly, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.  

Megan McArdle has the opposite problem--she is very adroit at the abstract, but she, from all appearances, has only a limited exposure to life in the trenches. 

And she apparently has read Ayn Rand uncritically. And likely Animal Farm, too. She thinks "cutthroat capitalism," which creates vasts gulfs between the 1% and the 99% , is  necessary to protect that  most important driver of progress, Innovation.

Innovation took us from the stone age to the iron age to the industrial revolution to the information age. It is the basis for the most essential forms of human progress.

Ms. McArdle's problem is she, like Milton Friedman before her, has not the faintest notion of what real motivation is or what real innovation is, or what drives it.

Milton Friedman believed the only mechanism necessary to keeping drug companies from producing teratogenic drugs (those which cause birth defects) is the threat of lawsuits--as if a lawsuit would help a child born to a mother who took thalidamide. Mr. Friedman believed the FDA should be dissolved--prevention being a public health value of little monetary benefit.

Ms. McArdle  thinks that abstract thing which has wings, the inspiration to try something new,  is only possible from men and women who are dazzled by the prospect of earning huge fortunes. 

This may have been true for some people: perhaps Bill Gates was driven by the desire to be the richest man in the world, maybe Steve Jobs too, although I rather doubt that was what motivated either in the beginning. I suspect they were competitive, driven sorts who wanted to beat the other people in their game and would have, whether they lived in a socialist state or a freewheeling economy, but I cannot know that.

But consider some real innovations and where they came from. 

Let's start with the Internet: created and nurtured and developed by government employees on salaries whose names we never learned and then given to the world, where entrepreneurs like Jobs and Gates could use it to get rich.

Consider RADAR, developed by British government scientists during World War II, who were never made rich by this technology which remains a critical tool in weather forecasting and the world's  air transportation system.

Consider the CT scan, which revolutionized imaging in medicine--developed by government scientists in England, i.e. by the National Health System, which Ms. McArdle dismisses as  a killer of the innovative spirit. 

Consider the identification of the plague, done by a free lancer who never made a cent for his discovery and he was the first to develop an effective serum to treat it and he never got a cent, but he did get the satisfaction of saving the lives of lots of Vietnamese villagers. His name was Alexandre Yersin.

Medicine is filled with men and women who worked in government labs or on government grants to: 1. Cure polio (Jonas Salk) 2. Identify the AIDS virus  3. Map the human genome  (in a race with a private enterprise)  4. Develop rocket science which was necessary to launching satelittes which was necessary to the world wide web.  5. Develop statin drugs to prevent coronary artery disease (Goldstein an academic, supported by government grants.)  

The list goes on and on in science, medicine and engineering.

And don't forget the military:  Government to its core, with nobody making all that much money, but men and women perform amazing feats of bravery and adaptation and innovation because they have developed great loyalty to their own primary group, their platoon or company. These folks are motivated by the desire not to embarrass themselves, primarily and by a lot of other things they lump under the rubric "Honor, Country, Duty."

What motivated and continues to motivate these men and women,  is the challenge of the problem, the possibility of changing lives, the thrill of solving a problem their peers could not solve and getting congratulated by men who matter to them. 

There are always those who are motivated differently:  They are in it only for themselves, and they often succeed. Lt. Dick in Band of Brothers was a perfect Ayn Rand hero; he would disappear whenever the fighting got hot, and reappear whenever the medals were handed out.  He wound up promoted to higher ranks and was last seen by the men who actually fought the battles when he appeared on a stage with the commanding general.  Selfish, successful, ruthless and thoroughly detestable, but a real Ayn Rand man.

Men like Tony Fauci and  Henry Masur at the NIH,the people at the Center for Disease Control, at the high security labs working  in Hot Zones with Ebola virus, these are men and women who innovate, who do work which makes society progress, none of whom are motivated by the prospect of making millions.  This the innovative core of America, out there, driven not by greed or money or desire for fame.  This is the real world, not the imaginary world of Ms. Rand or Ms. McArdle. 

Ms. Rand is dead. 

Ms. McArdle still has a chance to go out to the NIH, which is in her own backyard, and hang out among these government doctors and scientists, or to go to the National Bureau of Standards or to go to NOAA or any of a dozen other agencies where Innovation and motivation are alive and well.

Maybe, if she gets out of her office, out from behind her computer, she'll have a change of heart.