TechWonk Blog
TechWonk Blog
Go Back
-
President Obama today nominated two leaders for posts that are about, as their core mission, creating new U.S. jobs and building new global opportunities for America’s businesses. Mike Froman promises to be a strong leader as our next U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), and his nomination comes at a critical juncture for U.S. trade policy. With the push to complete the Information Technology Agreement [...]
-
Grey skies and rainy weather could not dampen the spirit of excitement and opportunity as the National Academy of Sciences today marked its 150th anniversary. President Obama was on hand, and offered a look not just at the legacy of America’s researchers, but also at the enormous opportunity that this generation and the coming generations of scientists will unlock. It’s not a speech that is likely [...]
-
My college statistics professor was the source of a truly memorable warning: “There are PT Barnums in data analysis who can easily influence people who’ve either never taken a statistics course or slept through one.” That’s good advice for policymakers because in major policy debates statistical wars usually occur, and some PT Barnums do surface. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is vying for the [...]
-
There is one word that shows up consistently in President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget: innovation. We see it in the descriptions of almost every federal agency’s spending blueprint. (In fact, the word “innovation” shows up 107 times in the 244-page budget.) The investments that the president proposes in research and development (R&D), in scientific exploration, in cutting-edge education initiatives, [...]
-
Under a beautiful blue sky in the Rose Garden this morning, President Obama laid out the three key questions that drove the priorities in his just-released Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget: “How do we make America a magnet for new jobs? How do we give our workers the skills they need to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” Some of the key initiatives put forward [...]
-
In October 1986, then-Los Angeles Lakers Coach Pat Riley confronted a major challenge: How to restore a talented basketball team to dominance in a highly competitive league. His response proved to be the most pivotal strategic decision of his career: He made his most innovative playmaker, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the focal point of the team’s offense. Riley believed Magic had not reached his full [...]
-
Back in 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) embarked on an ambitious plan to map the human genome (HGP). The project had a number of technical questions it hoped to solve, but the basic premise was to glean greater insight into human DNA. While the federal government was the key driver in the project, it was very much a public-private partnership in that [...]
-
The American story is littered with tales of displaced workers. These workers, often through no fault of their own, were left by the wayside as the economy’s defining characteristics evolved. An innovation-driven, dynamic economy could change a worker’s skillset from incomparable to incompatible overnight. That is the harsh lesson of our history as the country moved from an agrarian to an industrialized [...]
-
We’re two days from the deadline that Congress and the President set for themselves to find a solution to dodge the indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts to federally funded programs, otherwise known as sequestration. Sequestration, if you remember, was the mechanism approved by Congress and the President in 2011 to spur greater focus by both to take steps address the nation’s deficits. It was believed, [...]
-
As they analyze the two speeches tonight – the President’s State of the Union Address and Senator Marco Rubio’s Republican response, pundits are focused on the evening's political theater. Who applauded when? Was the tone fair or fractious? But those questions ignore the ones that are most important: What are the areas of agreement? And how do we get them done? When there is bipartisan agreement, [...]
- ...