The Informationist, a blog written by Bruce Abramson

The Arab Hot Spring and Cold War

Cross-posted at breitbart.com's BigPeace.  My first post as a Breitbart contributor.

With talk of the “Arab Spring” focused on whether it presages winter or summer, the whiff or metaphoric chlorophyll wafting through the desert misses a truly apt “spring” metaphor.  The demonstrations rocking the Arab world are a surface phenomenon, a hot spring bubbling up from fissures in the tectonic plates beneath the Middle East.  The post-Ottoman regional configuration is eroding, and the battle to influence its successor has begun.

Innovation, Competition, and the Future of the American Economy

Congress is about to pass a new patent law.  The FTC has launched an inquiry into Google’s prized algorithms.  The FCC finalized its net neutrality news and sent them to the White House.

To most readers, these headlines qualify as second tier business stories.  Worth a read perhaps, but hardly gripping material.  Few take the time to wonder if any of these stories are part of a pattern—or more importantly, whether they are part of a policy.  Their significance to a few big companies and their shareholders is obvious, but their importance to overall economic growth?  To the future of American leadership?  To the annoyingly persistent absence of jobs, jobs, jobs?  Those connections seem harder to make.

They shouldn’t be.  All three of these stories—and the many similar lower-profile stories like them—relate to innovation and competition policy.  And innovation and competition are the lifeblood of the future American economy.  We can only grow, thrive, and continue our leadership of the global economy as a country if we motivate our finest minds and greatest talents to want to grow, thrive, and continue leading the world.  Our innovation and competition policies form the heart of that motivation.