Jack Hitt Examines Why Amateurs Are the Job Creators
Forget Wall Street types—they don’t create jobs, not like startups and backyard inventors do. This American Life’s Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs, says dorm-room innovators can save America.
After getting ticked that her dying computer battery required a tangle of plugs and wires, a 22-year-old college student named Meredith Perry decided she'd poke around the subject to find out why wireless hadn’t made the leap to electricity. It’s the classic amateur move, and the story feels vaguely familiar, right? Because you know where it’s going: this paleobiology student, who was interning at NASA not long ago, is now the CEO of uBeam, a company poised to revolutionize life in the digital sphere.
But it’s the details of Perry’s success that make the story. Once seized with a desire to know why, in a world of remote control and Wi-Fi, we were still worrying about wires and adaptor bricks, she repaired to that authoritative source of inspiration: Wikipedia. Her investigations led one way or another but often to experts who told her that it was all too complicated and that the physics made it impossible.
Perry now gives TedxTalks about innovation and gumption, dissing the old guard’s boxed-in mentality. Turns out, those Wiki entries were enough for her to link two well-known technologies. Piezoelectricity is a form of power that is recharged through slight motion. So, Perry thought, forget about the difficulty of sending standard electricity through the air, why not send ultrasound waves—humans can’t hear or feel them—across a room to a piezoelectric battery?
Funding is now gathering behind uBeam. And should the startup deliver on this idea’s promise, next year we’ll all be tossing out the name “Meredith Perry” the way we currently sling “Mark Zuckerberg.”
The emergence of new startups and the reappearance of the backyard (or dorm-room) inventor is no real mystery. The era of the amateur typically revives right around the time it’s declared by conventional wisdom to be over. Our time, people breezily insist, is too complicated, too confusing, too corporate, too professional, too specialized for there to be any real amateur pursuits. And then, one day, that no longer seems to be true. A “maker” movement arises and flourishes, and DIY shops and labs pop up across the country.
Economic slumps and burst bubbles also help. It might just be random chance that when David Packard tinkered in a Palo Alto garage with William Hewlett in 1938, it was the height of the Great Depression. That garage was recently designated a Registered National Landmark. Why? Because in a country of backyard inventors, that’s the location of a lot of American ingenuity.
It might also be more random chance that the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, holed up
in a Cupertino garage during the stagflationary mid-’70s until they emerged with the first modern desktop. But probably not. The economy matters. These days, the Internet seems almost to have sped up the process, so in the future it might be a few dorm rooms that become registered landmarks.
Meredith Perry, the Founder and CEO of uBeam, speaks at this year's TED Conference in Nashville.
An amateur revival is on the way, in part not just because the current generation is learning the hard way that necessity is the mother of invention, but also because that’s how it typically happens here. In recent years, Wall Street investors have managed to flatter themselves with talk of being “job creators” and “risk takers.” But that’s ridiculous. By their own admission, they’re in the exact opposite business. The entire phylum of what they do is called “hedging risk,” not diving into it. And the recent rise of the phrase “job creators” is a bit of Frank Luntz jibber jabber meant to neutralize a lot of populist talk about “the rich.”
Refusing to join in the general flattery of big money these days is itself the real risk. Ask Nick Hanauer, an Amazon investor. He’s the guy who gave a Ted Talk recently that was so controversial the Ted commissariat refused to post it online until public pressure forced them to relent. Hanauer had found the one idea that Ted was afraid to spread, because, as curator Chris Anderson explained, “it would be unquestionably regarded as out and out political.” Hanauer’s treachery was not that he talked about income inequality, his stated subject. The entire nation has been openly discussing that subject ever since the Occupy Wall Street dude walked into a public park. Here’s the real treason that dinged Hanauer as a Ted-sanctioned talker: “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs.”
City rankings
Hong Kong's best
Jul 3rd 2012, 10:25 by A.B.
HONG KONG is the “best city” in the world, according to the winning entry in a competition devised by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and BuzzData, a data-sharing company. Competitors were asked to combine data from the EIU's liveability ranking with data from other sources to create a new ranking. Filippo Lovato, an architect concerned with urban planning, did this to winning effect with his “Spatially Adjusted Liveability Index”. This added seven new indicators on “spatial adjustments” to the EIU's ranking. Mr Lovato assessed cities' green space, sprawl, natural assets, cultural assets, connectivity, isolation and pollution on a scale of 1 to 5, and then gave the resultant combined score 25% of the weight of his new index. The remaining 75% derives from the five categories that make up the EIU's ranking: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.
Mr Lovato only examined 70 cities, rather than the 140 in the EIU's full ranking—he does have a day job after all—and in his efforts to choose the biggest and most geographically diverse places, he excluded the likes of Melbourne, Vancouver and Vienna, which occupy the top three slots in the main EIU table. Hong Kong, which comes 10th in the shortened, 70-strong liveability ranking, tops Mr Lovato's index thanks to particularly good scores for green space, (lack of) sprawl, natural assets and (lack of) isolation. Amsterdam comes second, six places higher than in the EIU table, thanks to good scores for connectivity (how easy is it to get to the rest of the world) and natural assets.
Mr Lovato's methodology can be seen here. For example, he uses proximity of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as a proxy for cultural assets. And he has decided that isolation is a bad thing for a city on the grounds that it
\different ways of life\So Shanghai scores the best possible \score and Stockholm the worst. I suspect these ideas won't meet with universal approval, though Hong Kongers may be more approving than most.
Sidney Harman, the 91-year-old founder of a stereo equipment company, has agreed to acquire Newsweek magazine from Washington Post Co.
Mr. Harman beat out three other final bidders, including investment firm OpenGate Capital and hedge fund Avenue Capital Group, for the 77-year-old magazine. Terms of the transaction weren't disclosed. However, little to no cash will change hands, people familiar with the matter said.
'Despite my years, I bring energy and a fresh approach,' Mr. Harman said. 'And I'm an experienced and knowledgeable businessman. I have a fundamental respect for the role of journalism and I think it has done no harm when you bring discipline to it.'
Like most magazines, Newsweek has suffered advertising losses as marketers cut back and turned to cheaper alternatives in digital media while its usefulness has been questioned in the era of Internet and cable news.
Other bidders appeared better situated to manage costs. Investment firm OpenGate Capital already publishes TV Guide magazine while hedge fund Avenue Capital Group had a deal lined up with magazine publisher American Media Inc. to handle back-office functions like printing and advertising sales.
Post Co. showed that this was not a purely financial transaction by telling Avenue it was uncomfortable handing over Newsweek to a group that would include National Enquirer publisher AMI.
Mr. Harman has agreed to keep a 'majority' of Newsweek's more than 300 employees, said Post Co., which will assume pension and retirement obligations. Certain severance costs for people not retained by the new owner will also fall on Post Co., according to a person familiar with the transaction.
'In seeking a buyer for Newsweek, we wanted someone who feels as
strongly as we do about the importance of quality journalism,' said Post Co. Chairman Donald Graham in a statement.
One employee Newsweek won't keep is editor Jon Meacham, who told his staff Monday that he plans to resign.
Mr. Harman is absorbing an operation with total expenses expected to be about $180 million this year and has agreed to assume far more in liabilities than his nearest competitors, according to a person familiar with the matter. But it was his commitment to retain more employees that ultimately allowed him to prevail at the end of the three-month process.