Be The Change

The last few pages are flying off the calendar. It can't come soon enough for me.

Less than 2 weeks now until we begin a new era.

This is going to be one helluva ride, and I think we are all underestimating the changes that we will see, the things that will be asked of us.

Our collective ox is in the ditch and it will take all of us to pull it out ... together.

Roger McNamee has a great post where he tells it like it is - we need something far greater than we've ever needed in the past, so great is the hole that we are in. In Obama Needs to Think Bigger About Infrastructure...

We need to stop thinking about infrastructure as an economic stimulant and start thinking about it as a strategy. Economic stimulants produce Bridges to Nowhere. Strategic investment in infrastructure produces a foundation for long-term growth. Imagine a twenty-year plan to upgrade our power grid, public education, transportation systems, and other infrastructure. The longer the time horizon, the easier it will be to align interests between those doing the work and those paying for it. President-elect Obama has a brief window of opportunity to align the country around an economic Manhattan Project. I hope he seizes it.

I think we'll get there, I hope we will that is, and I hope it will look something like the digital infrastructure stimulus in three parts (broadband, health IT, and smart grid) described in this article: A Stimulus Package We Can Believe In

ITIF released a report today that finds that a $30 billion investment in our IT network infrastructure would create almost 1 million jobs. The report looks at a $10 billion investment in each of three technologies: broadband networks, health IT, and the smart power grid. It finds that by spurring or supporting this level of additional investment would create or retain 498,00 jobs from broadband, 212,000 jobs from health IT, and 239,000 jobs in the smart grid. Approximately 525,000 of these jobs would be in small businesses.

Investing in these IT infrastructures has a number of benefits. For one, IT jobs are generally higher-skill, high-paying jobs from telecommunications line installers, to software engineers, to electric utility workers.

In addition, these types of IT infrastructure enable a whole host of innovations and new industries that a comparable investment in physical infrastructure would not. For example, broadband has spawned entirely new industries -- from Internet search to online retail -- creating employment not just in the new firms in these industries (e.g. Google, E-Bay) and the new occupations needed to support them (e.g. user interaction designers and online experience managers) but also through jobs created by individuals leveraging or using these technologies and services. To take but one example, Ebay has found that more than 724,000 Americans report that Ebay serves as their primary or secondary source of income. While obviously these are not all full time jobs (though many are), this lone example demonstrates the powerful ability of digital infrastructure to create jobs from this "network effect." These are new jobs being generated far upstream from the direct jobs associated with the initial investment to lay fiber optic cable, purchase hardware, or develop new software that supports health IT or a smart electric grid and the ensuing indirect and induced jobs.

See also A Broadband Stimulus Plan and the original ITIF report, The Digital Road to Recovery: A Stimulus Plan to Create Jobs, Boost Productivity and Revitalize America - here.