Ronald Reagan was not oil’s first choice in 1980.
John Connally was first. George H.W. Bush was second. Oil accepted Reagan and, through Bush, won political power for a generation, power it still has in the face of tech’s need for human capital.
So it is that we come to the 2020 game. Tech has been in the economic driver’s seat for 12 years, but in the political back seat for three. Tech has suffered for this. Its priorities have been ignored. It has been scapegoated by an Administration working in the interests of oil.
Technology is Democratic. It’s not a question of who tech prefers. Tech needs a seat at the political table, it will have a seat at the table, and that table will be Democratic. Assuming, of course, that democracy survives.
While technology isn’t behind Elizabeth Warren, then, it will accept Warren, assuming it gets a seat at the table. Maybe Kamala Harris’ seat.
Wall Street is going to lose in 2020, just as oil will.
Wall Street has been transformed by technology in this century, and not in a good way. Moore’s Law of Software has turned markets into apps. Thousands of brokers and insurance agents have lost their jobs this decade. Tens of thousands of bankers will lose theirs in the next few years.
The interests of technology, by contrast, are based on a need for more people, not fewer people. While Wall Street has been cutting head counts, technology has been raising head counts, and at rising rates of pay. The median salary at many tech companies is now over $200,000. https://www.wired.com/story/what-tech-companies-pay-employees-2019/ This means half of these firms’ workers are making more than that.
Companies like Google pay the big bucks because trained, enthusiastic, motivated brains are worth it.
Remember. Against Moore’s Law of Software, which increases software’s utility as distribution costs move toward zero, we have Moore’s Law of Software Development. There is no Moore’s Law of Software Development.
Software productivity can be improved with new languages, with new algorithms, and with open source techniques. But in the end, software productivity is still built upon the “Mythical Man Month.” You can’t radically speed a project by putting more people on it, the way you can build a cloud with parallel processing.
Moore’s Law of Software Development means that software has an insatiable appetite for trained, agile minds. Not just coding minds, but marketing minds, financial minds, and minds that can explain code in plain English.
Human capital has become the gating factor to economic growth. The more smart, motivated people a company or society has, the more they’re empowered by tools, by money, and by freedom, the faster it can grow. There are substitutes for resources. Clouds run on renewable energy to an extraordinary degree, and the heat generated in cloud data centers is often reused for things like water filtration.
For reasons of its own self-interest, then, technology’s politics line up with those of Elizabeth Warren and the other Democrats. There are a few assholes out there, like Peter Thiel, who think that having only a few smart guys at the top lets them crush everyone else with impunity. There are a few ignorant people out there, like Mark Zuckerberg, who consider Warren a nightmare for her proposals to break up the Cloud Czars.
Tech may have wanted Andrew Yang, and it may have bet on Kamala Harris. It will take Elizabeth Warren.
If we align our economic incentives with those of technology, recycling cash into the search for talent, if we can work against technology’s chronic labor shortages, our other problems are not intractable. The danger comes from nationalism, a key value in the oil universe, because resources are a zero-sum game, where I only gain when you lose.
Technology is more about the win-win. Over 1 billion people have been raised into the global middle class this century, thanks to solar panels, cell towers and smartphones. Trump and Putin stand for oil’s view of the world, in which every nation tries to keep the other over a barrel through control of scarce resources.
Here is what technology has proven true in this decade.
The Sun shines, the wind blows, the tides roll, and we live on a molten rock. Instead of trying to deny other nations something that’s in short supply, we should be trying to generate and create incentives for scarce talent. Instead of worrying about unemployment, we need to start focusing on labor shortages.
Elizabeth Warren’s plans aren’t perfect. I think she confuses the short-term business advantage of having been first to cloud with the long-term advantage of controlling markets. Universal cloud will let companies get around those problems. Even the “wealth tax,” said to be death to Warren’s chances, is just a way to recycle technology’s wealth into the creation of new talent. Bill Gates is for it.
Look at where technology has grown up. San Francisco. Seattle. New York. Boston. Are any of them run by conservative Republicans? Have any of them been, since technology began dominating those local economies? Democrats are strongest in cities where the “creative class” is using technology to create the future.
Then there’s the problem of China. China has 1.3 billion people. China could crush us if they win the race to the technology future and squeeze the rest of us with it.
Before Trump, China was exporting millions of people to this country, for schooling. Many of the best were staying, to build companies. Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Lisa Su of AMD were both born in the same small city in Taiwan, called Tainin.
Why does talent stay here, when China insists it needs talent? It’s because we have a secret ingredient that can destroy Xi Jinping and all he stands for.
We have freedom. Or we did, before Trump. We should, after Trump. Freedom unlocks human potential. Freedom to make a new path, to think differently, to even abandon the road you were trained for.
Take Joe Wong, please. He was born in Jilin, in far northeast China. He was born in 1970. His earliest memories were formed when Mao Zedong was still alive. Later he was trained as a chemist in Chinese universities, and then sent to my alma mater, Rice University in Houston, where he got a Ph.D in chemistry in 2000.
Then his path diverged. After working at a failed start-up, and then in a corporate office, Joe Wong decided to become, of all things, a stand-up comic. As one of my great Rice teachers said, “you got into Rice, you can do whatever you want.” He became an excellent stand-up comic. More people can understand Joe Wong’s comedy than that of any other comedian in the world, because he works naturally in both English and Mandarin.
There’s one more thing. Joe Wong is an American citizen. He’s more American than I am, because he chose to become an American, while I was just born here. Why did he do that, when China gave him so much? He did it for the same reason my great grandfather moved here from Germany, and why my other ancestors moved here from Ireland, from England and from Poland.
He did it for freedom.
Elizabeth Warren’s platform is built on Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Freedom of worship. Freedom of speech. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. Those four freedoms are what will deliver human capital in abundance. Add to them the liberty, democracy, and capitalistic opportunity our society has always stood for, and you have an economic force that cannot be stopped in our time.
Technologists will split in the primaries among a variety of candidates. But if Elizabeth Warren is the nominee then tech’s for Warren, because Warren is for what tech needs.
