This chapter does a wonderful job in tying together a lot of disparate threads, but one part that really makes me happy is how technological advancement has taken a massive leap forward now because the right officials are in the right spot. Government isn't frozen as it was under late-stage collapse Nixon, and so GUI-based computers get a big head start, along with networking through DARPANET (IIRC, ARPANET didn't get the name change until 1980). This will blast a big hole through DOS, and probably keep Gates/Allen from debuting Windows without a patent lawsuit. Definitely means Apple ain't happening on this side of the pond, although Jobs being the Svengali of India's IT Revolution will be quite the ripple. The downside? If McGovern doesn't win a second term, the GOP could completely accelerate the downfall of the union worker by putting all this funded tech towards lining the wallets of their well-heeled donor class through automation.
Also, a solid A+ for
@Yes in capturing the technology details accurately, pleasing my little developer heart.
Thanks very much! It is a substantively earlier kickoff for a lot of very important technology, from GUI systems to LANs to mice to lots of other goodness. It is, also, driven by an interventionist policy from the US government to promote promising tech and companies that either choose to move ahead with it or prove persuadable. Programming languages will, probably, be an interesting issue. Also (1) that this significantly outflanks IBM's development of desktop systems, doesn't mean IBM is out of the game but it does mean they will need to move hard and pick their battles in order to catch up, and (2) that the McGovern administration at the moment favors support to large US corporations that have the R&D resources to push ahead, like Xerox who here has the chance to spread its influence across a series of interlinked business and computing systems. Not the small-is-beautiful entrepreneurial Apple Corp. approach (some of us are so damn old we remember when Apple actually
was an entrepreneurially-minded underdog rather than a Bond-villain supercorp), instead an extension of the post war Big Science/Big Business nexus rather than a rebuke of it. At least so far. We'll see where Xerox actually goes with their system and what sorts of people emerge as alternatives or outright competitors.
Likewise, Other Steve's fortunes are very much up in the air but he is definitely in an interesting place where butterflies are set to flap vigorously. Besides the specific contours this helps give the TL, I was thrilled to learn a while back that Jobs had spent most of OTL's 1974 in India for a separate reason. As a Child of the Seventies it put me in mind of one of the best lines in the original
Muppet Movie, where Kermit and Fozzie first encounter Gonzo and his chicken ladyfriends. Gonzo tells them, "I'm headed for the film capital of the world - Bombay, India!" The multi-layered joke Henson and Frank Oz played with that line is that most Americans would chuckle at the notion that some place in the Global South was a bigger movie mill than Hollywood but, in terms of raw productivity (number of films per year, people employed, production companies, etc.) Bollywood was
already a bigger operation in terms of
physical capital (not dollars and cents, of course, but it had hit its inflection point there too) than La-la-land by 1979 when
The Muppet Movie came out.
Another impressive post, with an envy-inducing level of complexity and a ready fluency with concepts hither and yon.
You're very kind, and entirely appreciated.
This heavy focus on innovation and prepping the future economy has me wondering if it might not be in the cards to move up the SBIR program (or something similar) a decade or so. There's absolutely nothing in between the idea and realization unique to OTL or contingent on another 6-8 years of corporate r&d cultural development.
Keenly observed. An earlier SBIR does look to be on the cards as the administration seeks to promote innovation and also speaks to the wing of its supporters who favor decentralization and the small-is-beautiful approach and the belief that new discoveries are more likely from dedicated and creative small operations. Also, and this is a marginal spoiler at best, we will run across a TTL fact in the next chapter that the relevant senators from Indiana and Kansas are moved to act much more quickly when faced with substantive leaps in computer science and the like abroad, so we get an earlier (mid- rather than late-Seventies) Bayh-Dole Act on patent holding by public research institutions and the like. That likewise will encourage faster work in some fields.
At the same time, there are some very important people in the administration's economic-policy hierarchy - particularly Ken Galbraith and Lester Thurow, but others too - who belong to the Bigger is Better school. (That Atlantic piece about the loss of economic populism in Democratic politics is a bit reductive about Galbraith, the degree to which he preferred larger, centralized economic units was more about the fact he reckoned they offered fewer and clearer targets with which unions could bargain collectively, and that they would be easier to (1) regulate and (2) occasionally nationalize, but he did tend to dismiss the arguments for breaking down those structures into smaller units as out of touch with the general trends of postwar society and economics.) This is a present tension and potentially a coming conflict, both within the administration and between the administration and an admixture of both enemies and allies out in the body politic, over whether it's more efficient and effective to promote big, centralized organizations that affect a lot of people (as workers or as consumers and citizens) very directly or whether such concentrated structures should be busted up and more power and activity should be decentralized. Before we start booing the centralizers, we should remember that at this point it
was administratively easier for unions with mass membership to bargain collectively in industries where there were fewer corporate boards they had to tackle, that while some ownership in those companies did concentrate personal wealth it was (1) not to the same degree as these days in relation to average worker salaries and (2) was much more heavily taxed, and that Big Business sometimes produced a few geniuses too - fiberoptic cable came out of the Corning labs around the same time as the Alto came out of Xerox's operation at PARC, and by the mid-Seventies a team at Bell Labs among whom was numbered my surviving maternal uncle had mapped out how to recapitalize America's phone networks with fiberoptic efficiently, Ma Bell just didn't want to spend the money during the Stagflation Recession. There are pluses and minuses on both sides. But we may well see factions start to form among the McGoverners and their fellow travelers about whether it is more important to reform society's institutions as they are to benefit the most people in the most ways, or to revitalize democratic citizenship by going at many of those institutions with a hammer before they (the institutions) turn even harder on that citizenry.
When people talk about higher ed and the economy, it's generally assumed that the flagships and the elites are doing fine and the 2-years need support, but no one gives much thought to the regional unis. By this point in time states have moved to the university system model. You've got a lot of second and third tier schools out there, to be stereotypical about it, pumping out nurses and teachers but mostly just getting by without a plan. It sounds like Gavin's proposing a comprehensive policy to promote a more diffuse, regional kind of prosperity. Smaller schools that serve more localized needs- the most prominent national examples will be your Cal State schools- are a perfect partner for this. And if you're going to be creating an industrial policy that keeps more business in distressed urban areas, in second-tier metros, in small towns and micropolitan areas, creating funding mechanisms for them to take advantage of "home-grown" labs and brain trusts seems like a great way to keep costs low. And it provides another anchor to keep those jobs in place.
Another good call! Education is kind of standing in the corner waiting for a dance at this point, in terms of plot threads, but that will not carry on forever. As the administration (1) begins to work at a truly joined-up (as the Brits would say) economic/industrial policy and (2) looks more deeply at how workers can renew and reinvent themselves over their working lives and how people with less access to opportunity in the workforce can get a leg up when the administration can't manage - legislatively - just to redistribute enough income to compensate for that limited access, education looks less and less like an accessory or an afterthought and more like a
schwerpunkt, the place where you strike a decisive blow.
Also love the look in on Ford. I've got some orphaned census data (I pulled it out for my own research and didn't save the link) showing about 30% of households with two cars in 1970. Given that a substantial number of these households are going to be very well off and an over-representative number are going to be those living in isolated areas with no alternative but to have multiple cars, I wonder if the Ford brass would be treating the two-car-to-one-car problem as a quintessentially "middle-American" market problem to solve. It's still smart business.
It is, they're coming at it in this two-pronged fashion looking to help two-car people maximize their automotive return on investment, help people who've slipped through the two-car cracks back towards one in the strained economy also get the most for their buck, and with the whole Prima idea offered up ways for people who can only manage the one car get as close to exactly what they seek (this was another important selling point for the Japanese makers and Volkswagen
et al. besides mpg) as possible.
The teenagers are going to love the van. If you thought the VW Bus had enough room for your purposes, you crazy kids are going to get some serious use out of the Caroussel.
Indeed. You could mount an entire set of speakers in the rear cargo area, or avoid the ... angularity of automotive lovin' for hormonal teens, or even put one up on blocks and run a whole grow-op out of the back like a vast Detroit-built greenhouse. That's not to mention how many cases of Schlitz you could cart to the Foghat concert if it's just you and your S.O. in the front row. The possibilities are, like, endless, man.
I had to stop reading and jump in a country music hole when the Econoline came up. Subject of one of my
favorite songs in the "left my dead-beat man and hit the highway" subgenre. Imagine what she could do with the Carrousel! With liberalizing divorce laws and
all this space, you've got no excuse not to get the hell out of there with the kids, girl!
Nancy Griffiths is love, Nancy Griffiths is life. I remember when that hit vinyl, and seeing her first performance of it on
Austin City Limits promoting the relevant album. An absolute classic. Yes it does have a different look - the credits of the original version of
One Day at a Time will look rather different if Bonnie Franklin and her girls hit the road for a new life in a spacious, sturdy, homesteading Carrousel rather than that beat-up little compact. Less like Orphan Annie-style "cockeyed optimism will see us through" and more like a modern-day wagon train to a new frontier. Context is key.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]
