MCKINSEY GUY'S SALARY DEPENDS ON HIS NOT GRASPING EMERGENCE.

The Jarrett regency's secretary of transportation, Pete "What, ME worry?" Buttigieg got himself mocked, again, for attempting to disparage people who resisted buying an enclosed golf cart electric car.  "Pete Buttigieg Says Moving to EVs Is Like Moving From a Landline to a Cell Phone."

🚨 Pete Buttigieg disparages Americans who don't want to be forced into electric vehicles:

"I feel like it's the early 2000s and I'm talking to some people who think that we can just have landline phones forever." pic.twitter.com/fnHXMOGdlu

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 2, 2024

The posters Twitchy's Brett T. collected generally made the point that choosing to do something you want is different from being mandated to do something you don't want. "Buttigieg thinks Americans should get with the program, because this is the future, whether they like it or not."  That might be; and it's of a piece with the unholy alliance of Technocratic Wisdom and Rent Seeking that gives us the likes of McKinsey.

It's also paradigmatic of the way Democrats argue.  Watch any of their "strategists" on any televised panel, or dip into any of the speeches during their national convention, and somebody will very quickly attempt some witticism to denigrate people who don't see things their way.  There are more subtle ways of saying "Neanderthal."

What's missing, both from the boy mayor's sneer and the Twitchy pile-on, is the deeper understanding of the ways in which we have that computing power in our pockets is a consequence of the government going away.

The story begins over forty years ago, when the old AT&T monopoly agreed to divest itself, the same day that the Justice Department dropped its antitrust suit against International Business Machines.  All of that happened early in my academic career ... how glorious it was to be a young industrial economist in those days!  You won't find any posts on those days on Cold Spring Shops, because there was no Cold Spring Shops until twenty years later.

The logic of those two legal developments, though, is the beginning of our story.  Ma Bell wanted to be rid of its local exchange monopolies in order to be able to compete in long distance service with subscription providers, who understood that there was more money to be made handling business calls between Chicago and St. Louis than there was handling calls over the similar distance from Princeton, Kentucky to Big Stone Gap, West Virginia.  But Ma Bell would not connect entrants offering that volume service for business calls to its local exchanges in Chicago, St. Louis, or anywhere else, and the litigation began.

Those competing long-distance carriers used microwave relay facilities, as did Ma Bell.  That became the basis of the first lawsuit against the Bell System, opening the way to competing long distance carriers.  We did not yet have wireless telephone service as we understand them these days, but that was under development.  To the computer engineer, though, whether you send the bits and bytes over a wire or through the airwaves is immaterial.  A vertically integrated regulated monopoly, though, is not going to be able to manufacture desktop computers at Western Electric, because that Western Electric existed solely to provide telephone components to the Bell System.  An unbundled company, though, in which the local operating monopolies become independent companies, with the opportunity to compete in each other's local service areas as technical and economic circumstances permit, while the Long Lines division becomes one of several competitors in long distance service, with its manufacturing arm now free to do research into desktop computers.  The development of desktop computers, though, renders silly any notion that there is an antitrust-relevant market for general purpose business mainframe computers monopolized by International Business Machines.

At the time the AT&T consent decree took effect, the idea of generally available wireless telephony was still new, and the regulators were tackling something called "spectrum allocation," which is to say finding space somewhere in the meter bands to shoehorn in more bandwidth, without knocking, say, broadcast television or Mission Control off the air.  I got into the institutional and technical history of that in a long post a few years ago.

Combine competition in telephony and computers, ever-smaller programmable memory chips and visual displays, and improved packet handling through the airwaves, and you get those ubiquitous computers-in-your-palm we understand as smart 'phones.  Somehow we've even survived Ma Bell sort of becoming vertically integrated again, complete with their old "The System is The Solution" tagline.

We have a Cold Spring Shops to read because of that competition developing faster computers, less intensive use of bandwidth, and cheaper transmission of the packets.  All it took was for governments to back off, something the Secretary of Transportation doesn't seem interested in doing.