First impressions of Acrobat X

For the past several months, I've been privileged to be allowed to test Acrobat 10, which has now been released as the Acrobat X family. Now that I'm finally at liberty to discuss actual features in detail, I can give some impressions of the software. Overall, the news is good. Very good.

The biggest news is that by virtue of a serious UI makeover, Acrobat has gotten much easier to use; it no longer feels quite so heavy and monolithic. Adobe has done an excellent job of moving little-used commands out of view while putting more-frequently-used tools and commands in logical places (and letting the user configure toolbars as needed). There are now only 5 main menus instead of 10, for example. The product has scored a gigantic (and much needed) usability win, as far as I'm concerned.

The Save as Word functionality has undergone a significant, long-overdue improvement in quality.

Forms creation/editing is easier, thanks to the aforementioned UI overhaul. I'm getting things done in fewer clicks now. For heavier-duty form-design tasks, Acrobat Pro and higher (on Windows) will ship with LiveCycle Designer ES2. I'm of two minds about that. On the plus side, LiveCycle Designer offers superior forms-creation tools and comes with a nice assortment of prebuilt templates. As form designers go, LiveCycle's tooling is right up there with the best of the best. On the down side, forms you create with LiveCycle are (as before) not editable using the standard form-design tools of Acrobat. So you're stuck either in LiveCycle Designer mode or Acrobat-native form-design mode. And LiveCycle Designer makes it very hard to add scripts to form elements. I haven't tested the most recent Designer, but the version that shipped with Acrobat 9 has not proven (in my experience, at least) to be very stable, and on the whole, I remain somewhat disappointed with the relatively primitive integration between Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer. The sooner Adobe can make LiveCycle forms compatible with Acrobat, the better.

Acrobat X introduces a notion of Actions. The ability exists to standardize processes in an organization/department by combining multiple tasks into a single Action that can run on single or multiple files and that can be accessed through a single click. Users can author a new Action through File > PDF Actions > Create.

Enterprise customers of Acrobat X will no doubt laud the product's integration with SharePoint:

• You can open files hosted on SharePoint from Acrobat or Reader's Open dialog by browsing to a mapped drive or a WebFolder under "My Network Places".
• When a PDF is opened from SharePoint, you have the ability to independently check that PDF in and out, similar to Office, via an option in the File Menu.
• SharePoint is accessible from all of Acrobat or Reader's Open and Save dialogs: e.g., if there’s a dialog that prompts you to browse for a file, you can browse to a SharePoint hosted file just like a local file. And if there’s a dialog that prompts you to save a file, you can save to SharePoint just like you can save to your local drive.
• If the SharePoint system requires that version information be specified when the user checks in a PDF into SharePoint, Acrobat/Reader will prompt the user to provide that information.

The ability to save search results in PDF and CSV file formats is a nice plus, as is the new .xlsx export functionality.

Adobe Reader has been enhanced with the ability to create sticky notes and highlight text on PDF documents. Also, the Adobe Reader browser plug-in is now a 32/64-bit universal plug-in which supports Safari running either 64-bit (default) or 32-bit.

What's missing from Acrobat X? The JavaScript API still offers no Selection API. (I blogged about this before.) Also, the Net.HTTP API remains a disappointment: It's possible to do AJAX-like (asynchronous) POSTs programmatically, in JavaScript, but only from an application-scoped script (a so-called "folder-level" script), not a document-level script. And I couldn't get HTTP GET operations to work at all.

But overall, my quibbles with Acro X are few. On the whole, I think it's the best major new release of Acrobat to happen in many years, and customers should be quite happy with it.

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Freeeeeeeeaaaaaaak!

Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, writes of Paul Krugman:

I did not think that Paul Krugman was still writing academic papers. Nor have I seen any evidence in the last decade that he still has any sense of humor.

Consequently, I was surprised to see an article written by him entitled “The Theory of Interstellar Trade,” published recently in the journal Economic Inquiry...

A quick look at the acknowledgments, however, clears things up. The original manuscript was written in July 1978, when Krugman was an active researcher and being a curmudgeon wasn’t part of his professional identity.

Checking Steven Levitt's CV, I find that his last published paper was published in 2004. And here is an example of Levitt's sense of...um, levity, taken from the introduction to Freakonomics:

An elderly homeless man approaches [Levitt's car]. It says he is homeless right on his sign, which also asks for money. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red baseball cap.

[Levitt] doesn’t lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches, as if through one-way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along.

“He had nice headphones,” says [Levitt], still watching in the rearview mirror. “Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn’t look like he has many assets.”

A real knee-slapper.

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Why is Liu Xiaobo China's first Nobel prize winner?

Last week, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Charter 08, a document that calls for democratic reforms and greater political freedoms in the People's Republic of China. He is currently in jail for writing that document. When the prize was announced, China's state-controlled media and security apparatus began an all-out campaign to censor the story, blocking Web access to information about the award, arresting people who gathered to celebrate, and promptly imprisoning Liu's wife.

I should mention at this point that Liu Xiaobo is the first resident of China to win any Nobel Prize. Ever.

I cannot help but think that this is no coincidence.

Name a well-known piece of technology invented in China since the year 1400. Or name an important scientific discovery made in China since that year. If you can, you're a better Google hound than I, because I find absolutely nada. Nothing. In 600 years. China's technological and scientific underachievement is not a figment of Swedish/Norwegian bias.

What could cause a country with 20% of the world's population - twice as many as all of Europe! - to be the world's most spectacular scientific and technological dunce for six centuries?

Racist and Eurocentric theories that East Asians are less creative than Caucasians are patently false, as both historical and modern facts demonstrate. Japan, for example, has plenty of Nobel prizes and great scientific discoveries to its name, and is the birthplace of inventions such as (deep breath) the digital camera, the hand calculator, the floppy disk, flash memory, pluripotent stem cells, B-vitamins, the camcorder/VCR/VHS, and the compact disc (not to mention MSG, high-fructose corn syrup, methamphetamine, and karaoke). People of Chinese descent have made huge numbers of landmark contributions to science and technology...outside China. And, as everyone knows, pre-1400 China was the birthplace of paper, gunpowder, the compass, movable type, the horse collar, the astrolabe, compartmentalized ship hulls, and a long list of other awesome things that rivaled (and, during the Middle Ages, far exceeded) anything in Europe. It is clear that China's underachievement has been due to collective deficiencies, not individual ones.

Similarly, China's turbulent history in the 19th and 20th centuries, though undoubtedly a contributing factor, is hardly an excuse. Russia, which lost a far larger percentage of its population to wars and famines than did China during the same time period, and suffered under an equally blinkered communist regime, managed to put the first man in space and clean up plenty of Nobels. And the upheavals of the modern age cannot explain the so-called "Great Divergence" of 1400-1870, in which Europe took over from China as the locus of global innovation long before British warships showed up pushing opium.

Nor is this simply a case of China's inevitable catch-up. The U.S. was the birthplace of inventions like the steamboat and the airplane long before it caught up to European levels of per capita GDP. Even if China now starts to produce some innovations, it will still have 600 years of stasis to explain.

So what is China's problem? As I said before, I believe that the fact that China's first Nobel winner is an imprisoned dissident is telling. Liu Xiaobo is not the first Chinese citizen to be imprisoned by the state for calling for intellectual freedom; he joins a long and hallowed line of such persecuted thought-criminals, stretching back at least to Li Zhi of the Ming Dynasty.

Glib theories cannot easily explain the broad sweep of history, but my guess as to the cause of China's technological underachievement goes something like this: the act of trying to keep together a nation as large and diverse as China has come at the cost of intellectual, scientific, and technological progress. After 1400, as Mongol domination of China ended, the rulers of the Ming Dynasty soon found themselves in charge of an empire vastly more populous (thanks to new rice-farming techniques) than the earlier Han and T'ang dominions. Controlling and stabilizing this mega-nation required more government intervention in daily economic life than in most countries. China stayed together where European and Indian empires of comparable population crumbled, but the cost was constant suppression of potentially disruptive technologies.

The Ming began this unfortunate tradition by banning private shipping (just as European explorers were gearing up for world conquest), by purging science from the civil service examinations, and by sending a bunch of (basically) lawyers called the "Confucian Scholar-Gentry" into the countryside to regulate economic activity. Mechanical inventions comparable to, and centuries ahead of, the textile machinery that kicked off Europe's Industrial Revolution languished in obscurity and were forgotten.

European countries, of course, would have loved to do the same thing, but they couldn't. Although European nations were arguably more despotic than China during the Early Modern period, they were forced to fight each other in a series of endless wars; this not only spurred them to allow their scientists and inventors to do their thing (in order to gain a military edge over the neighbors), but it allowed visionaries like Columbus to shop around for patrons among the cornucopia of European rulers. China, with one Emperor - even a benign one - could afford to sacrifice progress in favor of stability. This is basically Jared Diamond's theory of "optimal fragmentation."

Even in the modern day, the absolute priority that China places on internal stability ("harmony," in their favored terminology) has contributed to the aforementioned bloody and chaotic history that delayed China's industrial revolution until 1979. The Chinese Civil War (really, wars), the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square - all of these were overkill on the part of Chinese rulers desperate to keep the far-flung empire as a single, unified, homogeneous nation-state. Excessive government control of academia has led to a culture of fraud and fear that continues to hamstring Chinese science. Meanwhile, Chinese splinter nations Hong Kong and Taiwan, and smaller East Asian neighbors like Japan, Korea, and Singapore, sped ahead while massive, monolithic Mainland China languished.

Far from being the champion of the Chinese race, as it has always claimed, the Chinese Empire - and its successor, the People's Republic of China - has been the greatest force preventing 80% of East Asians from finding new and better ways to live.

If my theory is right, it is no surprise that China's first Nobel laureate is not a scientist, but a would-be reformer. China's high-speed economic growth primarily relies on foreign technology and on brute accumulation of physical capital; the people who are doing the most new and revolutionary things in that country are those who are trying to reform a society hobbled by 600 years of excessive government enforcement of "harmony."

I think there is great hope for China to change. Modern communications and transportation technology has made it more possible than ever to hold together a large, diverse nation without sacrificing intellectual dynamism - the U.S. and India are cases in point. But cultural change is no sure thing. It seems to me that until and unless China Liu Xiaobo's succeed in their attempts at societal innovation, China's scientists will continue to lag behind those of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the West.

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Do higher taxes make the rich work less?

Greg Mankiw is an economist whose academic work I greatly admire and respect, but whose economics-related punditry often leaves me gaping in incredulous dismay.

Case in point: Mankiw has an editorial in the New York Times explaining why higher taxes on the rich will make the rich work less. He writes:

An important issue dividing the political parties is whether to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year. Democrats say these taxpayers can afford to chip in a bit more. Republicans say raising taxes on those who already face the highest marginal tax rates will hurt the economy.

So I thought it might be useful to do a case study on one of these high-income taxpayers. Fortunately, I have one handy: me. As a professor at Harvard and the author of some popular textbooks, I am comfortably in the income range that would be hit by this tax increase. I have been thinking — narcissistically, to be sure — about how higher taxes would affect me.

This is not how economics should be done; anecdotes prove nothing. And anyway, Mankiw's case is a terrible example of what he's trying to prove; he could make a lot more money in the private sector, but doesn't, because the prestige of working at Harvard matters more to him.

But let's put that aside and look at the data. That is what good scientists should do. When people are taxed for supplying something (for example, labor), the amount that taxes make them reduce their supply is called the "elasticity of supply." If this elasticity (or the "elasticity of demand) is high, then taxes hurt the economy by causing people to stop doing whatever productive activity is getting taxed. If the elasticity is low, then taxes don't hurt the economy much, and instead simply move money around from one place to another (which is what we want them to do).

So what is the elasticity of labor supply? How much does income tax cause people to work less? When economists look at the micro-level data, they find that it's about 0.1; raising average income taxes by 10% reduces labor supply by about 1%.

That's not much. The reason it's so low is that most people can't actually decide how much they work. Greg Mankiw may have the chance for side gigs as a consultant or a speaker, but he's a rarity in that regard; most people collect one single paycheck, and can't decide their hours. It's either a full workweek or unemployment. (In labor economics, this is known as the "extensive margin," in case you were wondering.)

This fits perfectly with what we see when we examine the historical record. In the 1970s, the top marginal tax rates were very very high - including state taxes, it was over 90% in some states. And yet working hours have actually declined since taxes were drastically cut in the early 80s. That's right: lower taxes, less work. Now, this is not to say that the lower taxes caused people to work less. The point is that Mankiw's warning about how higher taxes on the rich is going to stop them from working has no basis in historical fact.

These facts heavily imply that Mankiw's opposition to higher taxes on the wealthy is based not on any concern for the efficiency of the economy, but on his personal ideology. In fact, this is not conjecture; Mankiw has repeatedly and explicitly expressed the idea that rich people, having contributed more to society than others, "deserve" lower taxes.

In my opinion, this is not how good economics is done. Economics, I believe, should be about the facts first and ideology second; when Mankiw invokes largely specious arguments about the impact of taxes on labor supply, for the (unstated) purpose of advancing his ideology, he behaves not as a scientist but as a lawyer, disingenuously pushing his case using any means at his disposal. This is not fair to the American people.

Neither, in my opinion, are the policies he supports. This country already faces huge deficits, and spending cuts alone - though absolutely necessary - will not be enough to close the gap, especially as the Baby Boomers retire. Higher taxes are needed to keep our economy solvent. Because the elasticity of labor supply is so low, personal income taxes are a relatively efficient way of raising this money (as opposed to, say, corporate taxes, which are actually way too high in this country). If Greg Mankiw wins his battle to protect the rich from "undeserved" taxes, economic efficiency - which he claims to support - will be swamped under a rising tide of debt. Mankiw sullies his reputation as an economist by ignoring this looming danger.

Update: There's also another reason why income taxes don't discourage work as much as Mankiw claims: income effects.

Update: Ryan Avent makes a bunch more points about why Mankiw's analysis is simplistic.

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Google's WebP image format

Google has announced a new image format for the web, called WebP. Its advantage over JPEG? Better compression, of course. The above graph shows results obtained when compressing approximately "1 million images randomly sampled from a repository of images crawled from the web." Google's comparative study of WebP, JPEG 2000, and Re-JPEG can be found here. An image gallery is here.

According to Google, "WebP typically achieves an average of 39% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000, without loss of image quality ."

Converter code is available on the downloads section of the WebP open-source project page.

The WebP team is reportedly developing a patch to WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. It's anyone's guess as to when (or whether) the format will be supported by other browsers, but it seems likely that Firefox, Opera, and Safari will follow suit. The question, of course, is what happens if Internet Explorer ignores the format altogether (as seems likely)? The answer, I think, is that IE continues on its trajectory of becoming less relevant by the day.

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Why no one in the U.S. really wants to get tough on China

The House has just passed a bill that would allow the President to impose tariffs on China in retaliation for China's currency manipulation. Although the traditional defenders of the currency status quo have been predictably shrill in their reaction to this "protectionism," cooler heads realize that the bill means nothing. The Senate is not going to pass the bill soon (and most likely never), and even if it passed, the bill only gives Obama permission to impose tariffs; remember, Obama has passed up the opportunity even to label China a currency manipulator. Chinese officials, for their part, are not overly concerned. Nor should they be: America is not going to get tough with China anytime soon.

The reason America is not going to get tough with China anytime soon is actually pretty interesting, since it involves a unique confluence of factors. Both of the two main political blocs in America want to avoid doing anything about China's currency manipulation, but for very different reasons.

For Republicans, it is because China is making them rich. In addition to a massive supply of cheap labor, China offers American business owners low costs via lax protection of property rights and the environment. Here's how it works: When a businessman in China wants to build a factory, he gives a kickback to a local official, who allows him to dump toxic waste in the river and kick as many peasants off their land as he wants. That allows the Chinese businessman to provide goods to U.S. multinationals at extremely low cost, boosting U.S. profits and forcing down the wages of U.S. workers. Naturally, these effects are exaggerated hugely by the undervalued yuan.

In other words, China has given America's capitalist class what they have long dreamed of: in the words of Hyman Roth from The Godfather Part II, "a real partnership with [a] government." This gravy train is probably the main reason why capital's share of income in the U.S. has reached record highs (and labor's share record lows). Note that the same has happened in China.

But there's more. China's currency manipulation requires that China's government buy lots and lots of U.S. debt. That lowers interest rates in the U.S., which in turn allows U.S. finance companies to borrow lots of money very cheaply, thus boosting their profits (which reached 45% of all U.S. profits in the early '00s). Although many contend that these artificially low rates were a big cause of the recent bubble and financial crisis, finance companies - who, despite what the Tea Partiers would have you believe, are big supporters of the Republicans - continue to depend indirectly on Chinese financing for their yearly bonuses.

But what about liberals? You'd think that soaring inequality and collapsing middle-class wages would have Democrats thundering for retaliatory tariffs, but no; for reasons all their own, liberals don't want to get tough on China either. Many, such as Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias, fear that trying to force China to change its ways will start a new Cold War. That is something they really don't want. The first Cold War was a (temporary) disaster for liberalism - it boosted the power and importance of the U.S. military, encouraged red-baiting, and led to wars. A decades-long standoff with China might well tip U.S. culture back toward militarism. As a result, though Democrats have been perfectly willing to scuttle trade deals with small, weak countries like South Korea or the countries of Central America, China's great-power muscle has proven overwhelmingly intimidating.

Thus, although a few prominent figures (Paul Krugman among them) have urged the U.S. to take a harder line toward China, the bipartisan consensus is still overwhelmingly against taking any sort of action that would anger the Chinese. And the People's Republic, for its part, is prevented by its own domestic politics from correcting a currency policy that might soon cause dangerous imbalances. So the world's two superpowers will remain locked in an unhealthy, co-dependent embrace, until things get so bad that they force one or the other country to act. By then, of course, the cost of action will be much higher.

Update: Paul Krugman suggests that irrational fear of "protectionism," indoctrinated into Americans since the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs, is a big factor in scaring Americans into not doing anything about Chinese mercantilism. A friend suggested this to me. I'm not sure how big a role ingrained fear of "protectionism" plays in all this, but my point is that irrational fear isn't necessary to explain why America refuses to resist Chinese mercantilism. Most people are simply too leery of the consequences (higher production costs, higher interest rates, and worsened U.S.-China relations) that resistance would entail. The mercantilism problem, big as it is, isn't yet big enough to spur people to action.

Update: More from Krugman, who is pretty angry about the situation:

So, why did Tim Geithner feel the need to declare,

We’re not going to have a trade war; we’re not going to have currency wars. I don’t know what that means, but people are saying that.

I suspect that he was trying to reassure the markets — but if we’ve learned anything lately, I hope it is that actions, not talk, matter.

And look, if China continues on its present course, eventually we will have some serious currency and trade conflict. Furthermore, we should.

All Geithner did here was signal to the Chinese not to worry, U.S. officials will keep making excuses for China’s behavior and doing nothing, regardless of provocation. Remember, this statement comes after China blatantly reneged on earlier promises about the exchange rate. They must take us for fools — because we (or at least some of us) are.

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Is Obama anti-business?

The Economist has two articles (one, two) on whether Obama is "anti-business." According to both, business leaders are increasingly convinced that this is the case. The Economist writers can't figure out exactly why these attitudes exist, though...and since The Economist is probably the newsweekly that is read most by the business class, if they don't know, who does? The notion of Obama as anti-business, it turns out, is not really supported by the facts:

No matter that other Western politicians have publicly played with populism more dangerously, from France’s “laissez-faire is dead” president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to Britain’s “capitalism kills competition” business secretary, Vince Cable (see article); no matter that talk on the American right about Mr Obama being a socialist is rot; no matter that Wall Street’s woes are largely of its own making...

A president who truly wanted to wage war on business would have hung onto GM, not rushed to return it to the private sector. Card check has not been pushed. The finance bill, though bureaucratic, is not a Wall Street killer. With the exception of a China-bashing tyre tariff and a retreat on Mexican trucks, Mr Obama has eschewed protectionism. A lot of government cash has flowed to businesses, not least through the stimulus package. And above all his policies have helped pull the economy out of recession.

and:

Yet does Mr Obama really have a case to answer? Certainly, some of the wilder allegations by some businesspeople should never have left the 19th hole. Mr Obama has consistently made it clear he favours a mixed capitalist economy. The big incursion of the state into finance took place on his Republican predecessor’s watch. And although he doubtless went further than a McCain administration would have done to help GM and Chrysler survive, he has stuck to his pledge to return them quickly to private ownership. He used this year’s state-of-the-union message to commit himself to helping corporate America double its exports, and has appointed a council to propose ideas for promoting more innovation...

Moreover, the main reason so many American bosses are down in the dumps is the sluggish economy. Mr Obama inherited the recession from his predecessor, and the economy has recovered, somewhat, since then. Besides, it was corporate America, in the shape of the Wall Street banks, that was largely to blame for the depth of the recession. It might have helped Mr Obama’s relationship with business if he had gone on less about “shameful bonuses” on Wall Street; but some shame was surely in order.

Even a Republican administration would have been obliged to reform financial regulation, and, though there is a lot to quibble with in the Dodd-Frank act, the administration responded to requests from Wall Street to kill some of the more alarming reform proposals from Democrats in Congress.

Furthermore, the writers of the two articles are divided on what Obama could possibly do to seem more business-friendly; one heartily endorses the idea of tapping a CEO to replace outgoing economic advisor Larry Summers, the other dismisses this as a superficial PR move. It's not surprising that the writers don't know what to recommend; if you don't know the disease, how can you know the cure? In the end, both are forced to the same conclusion: Barack Obama is perceived as being anti-business because he smells like a socialist:

[Obama] has some rhetorical form as an anti-business figure—unlike the previous Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton, who could comfortably talk the talk of business. Mr Obama’s life story, as depicted in his autobiography and on the campaign, was one of a man once mired in the sinful private sector (at a company subsequently bought by The Economist), who redeemed himself only by becoming a community organiser; his wife had a similar trajectory. There are the endless digs at Wall Street and Big Pharma, not to mention the beating up of BP. He remains a supporter of “card check”, which would dispense with the need for secret ballots in establishing a trade union. His legislative agenda has centred on helping poorer individuals (the health-care bill, part of the stimulus bill) or reining in banks (the financial-reform bill). The only businesses he has rescued are the huge union-dominated General Motors and Chrysler.

and:

[A]s a person with first-hand experience of Mr Obama’s decision-making points out, the “atmospherics really do matter”. The mere perception that the administration is anti-business is “starting to make the bosses of Fortune 500 companies more risk-averse,” says a billionaire who used to run one of America’s leading internet firms...

As for Mr Obama, when he meets businesspeople at fund-raisers and the like, he too often shakes hands and moves on, leaving them feeling he was more interested in a photo-op than a conversation. He caused offence and disbelief a while back by turning up for a meeting with a group of prominent chief executives and then reading to them from a teleprompter.

I think that this story is basically right. Businessmen fear Obama simply because he is not one of them. Obama comes from an academic and nonprofit background, and has in the past been sympathetic to socialist ideas. Even though his actions have been broadly pro-business, his identity is as a guy who comes from sectors whose attitudes are often inimical to industry. The fear among the business class - the "uncertainty" that one article claims is now starting to hurt the real economy - is simply the fear that, at any moment, Obama will revert to his roots and start madly swinging the wrecking ball of socialism through the American private sector.

I personally believe this fear is ungrounded. Obama is an obviously a guy who is inclined to listen to the "experts" on basically everything, and on business issues those "experts" are people who are far more sympathetic to the business class than Obama was in his youth. And I also believe that "uncertainty" over Obama's potential metamorphosis into a socialist Comrade Hyde is far down the list of things holding our economy back.

That said, however, I think it's counterproductive to allow this myth to persist at a time when other types of social strife (think: Tea Party vs. blacks and Hispanics) threatens to strain America to the breaking point. We do NOT need businessmen flooding the racist Tea Partiers with cash simply because they're scared that Obama will go all commie on 'em. And so Obama would do well to make friends with America's business class.

How can this be done? I think the second article has some good ideas about image management. Start dishing up pro-business rhetoric in speeches (and confine anti-business rhetoric to criticism of the finance industry). Have regular candid meetings with business leaders, and take their concerns to heart. Establish regular liaisons between the administration and the business community. Start trumpeting the pro-business nature of policies like export-promotion and research support that are already pro-business in substance.

Also, there are pro-business policies that are pretty obviously good for the country. Our corporate tax needs to be cut from 35% to 20% (with the revenue replaced by personal income tax or value-added tax). Cutting corporate tax is something that a series of Republican presidents has somehow managed to avoid even suggesting, so there's a big opportunity there; and, conveniently, it's something that will help poor people (low-wage workers and consumers) just as much as rich people. This could be a big winner for Obama.

But in the end, whatever happens to the Obama administration, this issue shows that America suffers from a sectoral divide that we should find a way to heal. For too long, many in academia and the nonprofit sector have viewed private business activity as inherently suspect and disreputable; profit is often denigrated and frowned upon. Listening to rhetoric I've heard from some (certainly not all!) academic and nonprofit sector workers, I'm not surprised that U.S. businessmen fear a president who comes from that walk of life. Until we recognize, as a nation, that all of our sectors are important for national prosperity, class warfare of this type will hamstring sensible policy at the highest levels.

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