Re: [Phys-l] an all-too-predictable blackout

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

The sound quality on phones is a case where competition actually reduced the
quality in one direction while making the product more desirable in other
directions.  You can still get at a very low cost a phone which plugs into a
land line and has excellent voice quality.  But people want small portable
phones filled with gee-whiz gadgets, so the manufacturers put voice qualit
on the back burner and gave them what they wanted.  All cell phones are
inferior to most any land line phone.  You have to get the phone in the
sweet spot and even then the quality is not that good.  The sweet spot is
very small.  Just look at what consumer reports had to say about voice
quality of phones.  Incidentally once you factor in the fact that you have
to pay for replacing your phones, is the current service still that much
cheaper?

Competition is like evolution.  Both can either make the product/species
more fit, but also can drive them in the wrong direction.  After all most
every product and species eventually goes extinct.  For example competition
can make energy companies create less safe worker conditions.  The recent
mine disasters have illustrated this all too well.  The rush for energy can
make companies take short cuts as in the BP disaster.  So they kill some
workers and foul the environment so that the rest of us can get cheaper
energy.  Look at Pittsburg in the heyday of the steel industry.  It was
awful.  Finally it was cleaned up using regulation, not competition.

As to safety in the workplace even regulation is not quite adequate.  When
you have just 2 competing factions, the companies and the government one
tends to get into bed with the other and usually the government gives in to
the company pressure.  But when you have 3 or more competing factions this
does not happen as readily.  So having a strong union presence provides a
third leg in the competition.

Will the infrastructure improve when you have competitive energy suppliers?
This is a debatable proposition.  If you had at least 3 different suppliers
each with their own delivery system, it might happen, but you currently have
multiple suppliers competing on price but only one of them is in charge of
the infrastructure.  So is there an incentive to improve infrastructure to
deliver other suppliers energy???  At one time we had competing fire
departments and it was a disaster.  Some people refused to pay for fire
department protection, and the response was spotty or they might just let a
non-payer burn down which then cause other houses to burn.

In the days of Ma Bell you had good quality sound, but fewer gee-gaws.  In
addition we had Bell Labs which provided most of the basic research for
understanding sound perception.  And we were the leader in recorded sound
quality with the earliest stereo recordings.  True, the Germans invented
tape which gave them an edge for a while, yes, and Berliner invented the
gramaphone which killed the Edison cylinder.

Economics is not a machine which works automatically and always produces the
best results.  The Friedman school has been discredited when the stock
market was found to be a chaotic system.  Actually economics is really in
many ways a social science because perception is a very important part of an
improving economy.  When people percieve good times are here they spend more
which creates jobs and provides an incentive for business.  But when people
percieve that we are in bad times you have opposite feedback, and the system
can spiral downward.  Sure competition can enhance a number of things, but
the system works better if you put in place controls that prevent disasters.
And these controls need to be changed as other economic conditions change.
Adam Smith even acknowledged that.  Economics is a very inexact science or
rather the "dismal science".

But now modern economists are acknowledging that among the good decisions
are many randomly bad decisions that cause economic problems.  And sometimes
the bad decisions win out because of human perceptions.  Just look at how
advertising and cheap food has created a nation of obese people.  So just
citing examples of good results is like saying I took Carter's Little Liver
Pills and it cured my cancer.  Just one example does not prove anything.

Economics is just now starting to deal with the problem of human
irrationality.  Look what happened when some alarmists started blaming
Autism on early vaccination.  Subsequent studies have disproved the link,
but many parents stopped innoculating their children.  As a result a number
of children have died needlessly.

Notice this is not a plea for a planned economy, as that causes other
problems.  But it did work for a while in China and improve the lot of the
average person.  But in the long run it is also a disaster.  So we go to a
more planned economy during a major war, and then turn the clock back when
the war is over.  Can competition solve the problem of global warming?  The
Tea Party types according to a recent survey are the most vehemently
anti-scientific.  Notice that JD pointed out that you need to consider all
possible outcomes, and plan for less likely events.  Some problems require
governmental intervention.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> > Cable and phone service keep becoming a better value for the money
> > because they can now compete against each other directly in 
> areas like
> > internet access and communications. The push to lay down fiber optic
> > cables to increase bandwidth (and compete better) has 
> resulted in much
> > more reliable system that is faster and (at least in my 
> area) cheaper
> > when inflation is factored in. I would expect that allowing 
> access to
> > more than one energy provider would result in a similar attention to
> > infrastructure improvement.
>
> One small comment; the phones themselves are of lower quality 
> IMO, compared to the days when you rented your rotary phone 
> from Ma Bell.  I.e. I don't see the sound quality has having 
> improved and the old black Ma Bell phones were built like 
> tanks that never broke.
>
> Just engaging in a bit of nostalgia.