The Pankian Metaphor 3051

the Boyd scenario is somewhat the lower-closer the decision is made, the greater agility and adaptability. the first approximation is that doing economic analysis to show that certain industries can only support a specific worker standard of living ... w-o subsidies is at least having informed decision making process. Creating a policy that encourages businesses in activities with economic reward below specific level to move to some other activity (possibly over 20 year period) still isn't really bad. Having environment where there is rigid top-down decision making usually is less adaptable and therefor frequently less compebreastive ... again the boyd scenario about us corporate structure in the 70s and 80s. recent reference:

on the other hand it could be done in such a way that benefits. there is the scenario that suggestion unearned profit tax on the us automobile industry ... with the explanation that the US gov. had taken certain actions to allow the industry breathing room to remake themselves ... and they didn't appear to be following those buttumptions. recent reference

a different example is one of the countries on the other side of the pacific ... sometime (by at least the early 80s), they had made a determination that IT was going to be an extremely important and profitable part of world economy and they wanted to be the leader by something like 2010 or 2020 (as well as provide industries with a compebreastive advantage in almost every kind of operation). They established that every company should invest some percent (X) of their profits in IT ... and if they didn't, the gov. would take it in tax. so in the late 80s, you saw things like steel and ship building companies (from this country) investing heavily in IT startups in the US (and other places in the world). One such was in the late 80s, there was an announcement that one of these large heavy industry corporations was buying half of Oracle corporation. The next quarter, Oracle finances significantly improved and the deal was canceled (Oracle had signed an enterprise license for an extremely large number of seats with a large international corporation).

misc. past postings mentioning Boyd other URLs from around the web mentioning Boyd

--