As a Colonel, John Boyd developed a framework to help train combat fighter pilots that became known as the OODA Loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act). He argued that the key to tactical success in combat is to obscure your intentions from your opponent while you simultaneously clarify and anticipate his intentions. By operating at a faster tempo in rapidly changing conditions, you both inhibit your opponent from adapting or reacting to changes and suppress his awareness of your actions. You cause an opponent to over- or under-react to uncertainty, ambiguity, or confusion. In military parlance, adopted by many technology strategists, you get inside their OODA Loop.

As an example, Barack Obama has been well inside Mitt Romney’s OODA Loop for the past month on issues of gender equality. His statements have frequently caused Romney to react in ways that Obama has clearly anticipated and exploited. But that’s another post. Today’s question is, has Amazon penetrated Apple’s OODA Loop with respect to eBooks? It sure looks like it.

The story begins in 2001, when Amazon observes Apple’s iTunes business model. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos must have been awed watching Steve Jobs turn digital music, which was free and widely pirated, into a money machine. Jobs integrated a device (iPods), a store (iTunes), and a wholesale deal with music labels for content under which they agreed to let him set the retail price of tracks (it would be $.99). Within a few years, Apple was the world’s largest music retailer and record stores were a distant memory (although a very fond one). Steve Jobs had figured out how to compete with free — the first but not last technology leader to perform this trick.

Amazon copied Apple in building its book market. It built a device (Kindles), tied to its store and it bargained with book publishers for a wholesale deal for content. Like Jobs, Bezos insisted that publishers let him set the retail price, which he targeted at $9.99 per book. It is likely that publishers in some cases set wholesale prices higher than that and Bezos lost money on early book sales, but as the market grew, his pricing power grew with it and the full cost of each eBook declined as well. Bezos knew that when Apple entered the book market late, they would be forced to either a) stick to their traditional wholesale model, where he had a significant first mover advantage, knew more about online retailing, and held a brand advantage (do you really think “book” when you think iTunes?) or b) try to compete by attracting publishers and letting them control the product price. Bezos knew he would win either way.

Bezos also knew that “talent copies, genius steals” did not apply to Steve Jobs, who never copied anybody. He had a pretty good idea that Apple would try to convince publishers to adopt “agency pricing“, which, in contrast to wholesale pricing, gives the publisher the right to set the retail price and pays the retailer a commission. Jobs knew that agency pricing would attract publishers who resented price pressure from Amazon and that publishers backed by Apple would force Amazon to raise ebook prices. But only the largest publishers were strong enough to threaten to withdraw content from Amazon — most stuck with their wholesale pricing deals. Bezos raised prices reluctantly and selectively to keep large publishers from defecting. That’s why some ebooks now cost $14.99 on Amazon, while most cost $9.99.

Better yet, Bezos also knew that the manner of Apple’s entry into the book market looked a lot like price-fixing. Price fixing rarely gets you into trouble when, as in Apple’s music or Amazon’s book terms, you force retail prices lower, but collaborative arrangements that lead to higher prices to consumers frequently incur the wrath of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. Bezos also understood that Apple could fall afoul of laws against price-fixing, even though Amazon, not Apple, has an effective eBook monopoly. A monopoly is generally not illegal unless you use it to jack up prices.

So what does Amazon do the day the Department of Justice discloses its investigation into Apple’s alleged price fixing? It lowers eBook prices. Apple has an estimated 15% share of the eBook market (courtesy, one suspects, of simple iPad users who don’t know any better). That share is heading nowhere but down under the agency model, which is why Apple should give it up as part of a quick settlement with the DOJ. I would not want to be eBook strategist Eddy Cue at Apple this week.

But Apple’s is not the only OODA loop in Bezos’ crosshairs. He is also deeply inside the heads of publishers, whose cockpits are blaring with enemy radar lock-in sirens — the last sound many fighter pilots ever hear. As he often does, Clay Shirky said it best:

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

Amazon has demonstrated a much greater ability than Apple to observe, orient, decide, and act to dominate the eBook market. This is the second sign of peak Apple in as many weeks and another indication that Jeff Bezos has taken over from Steve Jobs as the reigning strategist of the technology world. That said, eBooks is not the most important market where these two companies will go head to head. That would be payments, because nobody else has 100 million credit cards on file. Bezos should think very hard about this one. Apple owns a big piece of mobile and can be on his tail payments in about 40 seconds.

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As an earlier post detailed, universities rarely go out of business. This is thanks to the magic of a three part lock that secures their position and protects them from institutional challenge. For centuries, universities have enjoyed the exclusive right to allocate valuable social capital.

• Select talent. There is no evidence at all that Stanford, Harvard, or Berkeley do a better job of training undergraduates than Ohio State, Texas A&M, or the University of Florida. But they select far stronger students. If colleges were assigned students randomly, the value of “elite” degrees would plummet overnight. Harvard delivers 90% of its value the day it admits a student, although the market recognizes the value only when the student graduates. In a previous post, I described an experiment I once proposed to compare students admitted to Harvard Business School who attended with those admitted who did not attend. Others have since confirmed what we all know: Berkeley selects strong students, it does not create them. You aren’t smart because you went to Berkeley; you went to Berkeley because you were a certain kind of smart.

• Credential talent. College degrees confer professional access and mobility. Since mobility is “path dependent” (your current options are constrained by past decisions, even if past circumstances are no longer relevant), it matters enormously what choices a credential opens up for you. Take it from a factory worker who went to Harvard Business School.

• Signal social standing. Signaling is a cousin of credentialing. A credential is a specific signal to the labor market that a person completed a course of study and mastered a body of knowledge. But it is relevant mainly early in a career. The broader social and economic signal conferred by a university degree extends well beyond the time when the details of the course work are forgotten. An honors degree from the University of Maryland confers standing, especially in Baltimore, that extends well beyond the knowledge gained from a degree in European History. There are very few signals of social standing as powerful as a college degree, even though very little evidence suggests that this should be the case. Powerful alumni affiliations reinforce this effect.

It takes decades for universities to establish these privileged positions, which is why, with rare exception, the top decile universities of fifty years ago are the top decile universities today. This is partly due to the place university degrees have come to hold in our culture. It is an unquestioned (but economically threatened) article of faith among middle class families, including mine, that providing children access to higher education is an essential to giving them a full range of life choices. Most people are disinclined to risk their kid’s future on education institutions with highly plausible training programs but unproven power to select, credential, and signal. (Yeah, I’m looking at you Minerva Project).

The paradox is that universities clearly add value (after all, college degree holders earn a million dollars more over their lifetimes than non degree holders and many economists declare it our single most competitive industry) but much of this “value” has nothing to do with learning, which is what employers presumably value. And if the credential cannot communicate what you know, then its signaling effects diminish. More accurate and effective approaches to credentialing and signaling become plausible. As detailed earlier, there are dozens of startups ramping up high quality educational programs that are either free or very low cost. But without credentials accepted by employers, all of the free online courses in the world will not translate into increased economic opportunity for graduates. To make these programs viable, they need a portable credential that is widely accepted by employers but not controlled by universities. Who would devise such a thing?

Universities, of course. As Kevin Carey describes in the current Journal of Higher Education, the future is full of badges, not unlike the ones you earned as a scout. UC Davis, together with The Mozilla Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation is prototyping the development of digital “open badges” that validate “skill, quality, or interest”. Badges would be online and would allow a potential employer to access details of a student’s written work, test results, videos, etc. Open badges would communicate a great deal more than “BA in Economics from Sonoma State”, which is what employers get today. The article failed to record any sense of irony among the rope makers at the University of California.

Under the Mozilla Open Badge framework, a badge “is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest” used to represent skill or achievement. Badges support a wide variety of learning beyond traditional classrooms including online courses, after-school programs, as well as work and life experiences. Badges not only signal achievement to peers, potential employers, educational institutions and others, but they are a way to recognize and document informal learning as well. Fully developed, badges should help people transfer learning across jobs, industries, and places and portray a richer, more complete profile of an individual’s professionals strengths.

Mozilla expects there to be many types of badges. Some capture specific skills, something traditional degrees do quite poorly. Badges can support specialized and emerging fields that do not yet credential learners. They can document a much larger diversity of skills, social habits, motivations, etc. Badges potentially represent an alternative to traditional degrees as a way to enhance identity and reputation among peers, find peers and mentors with similar interest, formalize camaraderie, teams, and communities of practice that today often form around universities or professional associations.

Open digital badges, unlike the scouting ones, are valuable because of their metadata. They link to videos, documents, or testimonials demonstrating the work that lead to earning the badge. They link to the issuing authority, which can be a school, a professional body, an international credentialing agency, a community of professional practice, a course, or a company. The supporting metadata reduces the risk of gaming and builds in a system of formal or implicit validation. In this system, a digital badge is backed by metadata that explain the badge, the issuer, the issue date, criteria for earning the badge, the earner’s work or evidence behind the badge, and the current validity of the badge, which, unlike a college degree, can be set to expire.

Mozilla is creating an Open Badge Infrastructure to serve as the core technical scaffolding for a badge ecosystem that supports a multitude of issuers, badge earners, and badge displayers. This infrastructure includes the core repositories and management interfaces (each user’s Badge Backpack), as well as specifications required to issue or display badges. Users can build a “Badge Backpack”, which serves as a repository for their digital badge data, accessible only to them, where they can view badges, set privacy controls, create groups, and share badges. Startups like BadgeStack, which gamifies badges, can build OBI compliant sites and award apps.

Open badges are a promising idea and one deserving of investigation by companies, entrepreneurs, universities, and investors. They threaten traditional university credentials because they are:

• Granular. Employers care what you can do; they care relatively little about what you study, except as an indicator of what you can probably do. Badges are likely to reflect specific skills (“architecting social media databases” or “PHP”). Some may complement licensure (“palliative care nursing”) others may document skills in areas where little certification is available today (“Thai cooking” or “cloud-based SQL database administration”).

• Open. To work, badges need an approval process and an ontology that reflects a hierarchy of skills. An licensed vocational nurse may be able to earn a badge in discontinuing intravenous drips, but I’d prefer that the Thai cook obtain his or her LVN certification before tackling this skill. Once these structures and privacy controls are established, the technology for making badges machine readable, searchable, embeddable, and portable is relatively trivial.

• Able to evolve. The structure of badges itself needs to be open. Today “Thai Cooking” may be a sensible badge. Tomorrow it may be “Kitchen safety and peppers” (I worked with a cook who accidentally sent 50 diners choking and gasping out the door, hospitalizing two of them for lack of this knowledge). Badges that are ten years old will frequently fade in value as others rise. Badges create a market in skill certification — precisely what should replace university degrees.

• Cumulative. A single badge may or may not signal a great deal, but a sash full of badges accumulated over many years of effort makes you an Eagle Scout. Employers are very likely to value particular combinations of badges for specific jobs. Today, resumes or transcripts do a notoriously poor job of communicating these capabilities.

• Essential to reputation markets. Badges form core elements of emerging reputation marketplaces, where professionals collect, curate, and disseminate information that reflects their professional skills and achievements much as Fair-Isaac today distributes information about your credit history. For some positions (VP Marketing for a startup, for example), leadership history may matter more than a documented set of specific skills, but badges will still contribute to the overall picture.

Badges are not a sure thing. At first they will complement university degrees, not substitute for them. Badges face nontrivial privacy and trust issues — many which Mozilla is addressing quite well. They are an essential foundation for a portfolio that documents a range of professional skills, achievements, experiences, and relationships.

One of the largest challenges facing open badges are cold start problems: early adopters will not have very few badges and employers will be unfamiliar with them. These are the sort of market development problems that entrepreneurs are good at conquering, although this makes them no less formidable. Mozilla may crack this market wide open.

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Blodget now leads Business Insider and last night presented a very good piece of research on the growth of mobile to a conference in San Francisco. Towards the end, he describes Draw Something, a game app that has created a buzz around here. Blodget argued that Draw Something, by a startup called OMGPOP, reveals just how explosive the combination of mobile, social, and games can be. He reminded us that Draw Something launched just six weeks ago.

• It has since been downloaded 20 million+ times. It is the #1 app in 79 countries. It has 12m daily users and generates $100,000 of revenue daily for a small team in New York.

• Users are highly engaged. They drew 3 drawings per second on Feb 12. Two weeks later, they drew 100 times that: 333 drawings per second. 10 days later, it was up to 3,000 drawings per second. Users bring in other users, who bring in even more users. This is what viral growth now looks like on global, Internet scale — and stories like this are about to become fairly common.

• The resulting growth rate is unhinged. It tool AOL nine years to acquire 1 million users. It took Facebook nine months to earn its first million users. Draw Something did it in nine days.

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A series of well-researched articles by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times that included a long article on sweatshop subcontractors put Apple on the defensive. It appears that hard working people risk their lives to make sure that our iPads are shiny. Apple responded by asking the Fair Labor Association to investigate working conditions at its Chinese suppliers. Back home, Mike Daisey’s professional self-immolation magnified the controversy by forcing NPR to retract a series of assertions about Apple’s Chinese suppliers. This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited a huge Foxconn assembly plant in China as the FLA issued its report. Cook knows a lot about manufacturing both as a global supply chain expert and as a former factory worker.

Cook played the event perfectly. When the FLA reported that, shockingly, Chinese factory workers endure long hours for low pay, he promptly gave workers a raise by pledging to cut hours without cutting pay. The audience applauded, the curtain dropped, and the world returned to its apps.

The story displays a confidence and an ability to turn crisis into yet another advantage that makes me wonder whether we are approaching peak Apple. Apple raised Chinese wages not simply because it cares so much, but because it can afford to care so little. They know that their move causes bigger problems for their competitors than it does for them. Apple cares less about Chinese labor costs than Dell, HP, Google, and many others who produce lower margin products that use more Chinese labor. Apple spends about $8.25 per iPhone on Chinese labor – a completely irrelevant number in the lifetime economics of an iPhone. Had Chinese workers targeted Apple for a campaign to increase their wages, they would have chosen well.

Is Apple’s move good for Chinese workers? Sure — for some of them anyway. Apple’s decision does not mean that Chinese workers will necessarily take home more money — just that they will work fewer hours. This may not sit well with workers at Foxconn and other subcontractors, most of whom move from the countryside, live in company housing at the factory, and want to maximize their earnings, not minimize their working hours. Duhigg’s excellent reporting cited a factory where workers rioted when hours were reduced under pressure from a western customer, acknowledging:

The other (workers) we talked to all seemed to regard it as a plus that the factory allowed them to work long hours. Indeed, some had sought out this factory precisely because it offered them the chance to work more.”

Does China benefit from this decision? Not necessarily. Manufacturing jobs are declining China in favor of Vietnam and Cambodia (the great promise of the campaign this week by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is that Burma will attract urban factories to relieve the punishing life of rural peasants). It surprises many Americans to learn that manufacturing employment in China is actually declining. With the Apple settlement raising labor costs, peasants in adjacent countries can cheer: soon they too can trade in their hoes and hats for a white coats and the opportunity to polish iPads. Nobody said economic progress was beautiful.

Apple’s decision to polish its “Think Different” brand built on images of Ghandi and Cesar Chavez is tribute to both the company’s high moral tone and to it’s willingness to indulge the low economic literacy of its Western customers. Apple sells products to people who prefer a world in which every kid can go to college and work eight hour days. Apple customers hate sweatshops, even those that are demonstrable vehicles of economic progress. We have a hard time acknowledging that countries in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or Haiti demonstrably need more sweatshops. We commit what economist Harold Demsetz memorably called the Nirvana Fallacy: we compare the choices facing overseas workers to the alternatives we have, instead of to the alternatives they have.

As economist Eric Crampton notes:

Harold Demsetz warned in a beautiful piece of economic writing back in 1969 against what he called Nirvana Theorizing. He said there that we can’t say markets fail just because they deliver outcomes that we don’t like; rather, we have to compare the outcomes of markets to real-world achievable alternatives. We can’t just assume Nirvana on the other side of the scale. And, most of the arguments against sweatshops effectively assume Nirvana on the other side: if only we were to ban sweatshops or, more realistically, impose bans on the import of products produced by sweatshop labour, the employees would suddenly be freed to pursue fulfilling careers or to go and get that Bachelor’s in Cultural Studies that they’ve always wanted….. It’s only the evil sweatshops that are keeping them from achieving their dreams.

If only it were that easy. For proper comparative institutional analysis, we really have to look at how working in a sweatshop compares with what else these workers could be doing.

Inconveniently for the Nirvana view, thousands of people voluntarily line up outside of Foxconn’s gates when factory jobs open up. Those clamoring to work at Foxconn know that factory work is tough and sometimes dangerous. But, like factory workers everywhere, they know that farm work is worse. The Times documented a horrific aluminum dust explosion in a Foxconn plant. This is not something to take lightly (my grandfather, uncle, and kid brother all died on the job or from occupational illness; occupational safety has never been an abstract problem to me), but the risks of factory work are nothing compared to the risk of illness (especially malaria), injury, or poisoning faced by Chinese peasants. Just about everyone who has tried both farm and factory prefers the latter. I worked in several factories; most of the jobs were boring and some were wildly unsafe (I thought for awhile that Westinghouse had a “hire the handicapped” policy because so many of my co-workers were missing fingers or limbs. D’oh). But two days spent harvesting hay under idyllic conditions hurt me worse than any factory job I ever did. Former paper and aluminum mill worker Tim Cook also understands this extremely well.

Crampton cites recent work by Benjamin Powell on standards of living associated with sweatshop work showing that in most of the countries he studied, the average wages were equal to or better than the national average. In poor countries like Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua and Honduras, sweatshops paid twice the national average. This is why countries like Bangladesh, where 80% of the population lives on less than $2 per day, need more sweatshops, not fewer. Crampton reminds us of Nick Kristof’s reporting on workers in a garbage dump in Phnom Penh. Kristof gets it:

Another woman, Vath Sam Oeun, hopes her 10-year-old boy, scavenging beside her, grows up to get a factory job, partly because she has seen other children run over by garbage trucks. Her boy has never been to a doctor or a dentist, and last bathed when he was 2, so a sweatshop job by comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty. At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade.

When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.”

Tom Harkin, a progressive, pro-labor Senator from Iowa, introduced a law in Congress in 1992 that understandably prohibited the import of products made by children under age 15. In 1997, UNICEF investigated the effects of the Harkin Bill and found that even though the legislation had not taken effect, the mere threat had

“…panicked the garment industry of Bangladesh, 60 per cent of whose products — some $900 million in value — were exported to the US in 1994. Child workers, most of them girls, were summarily dismissed from the garment factories. A study sponsored by international organizations took the unusual step of tracing some of these children to see what happened to them after their dismissal. Some were found working in more hazardous situations, in unsafe workshops where they were paid less, or in prostitution.”

Once again, sweatshops are hardly the bottom of the heap — indeed the export shops targeted by Harkin are on average the better places to work. Most child labor is local production or rag picking, so if you ban exports, you may push some of the world’s most vulnerable children into the garbage dump, begging, child prostitution and starvation. This is not an argument for unfettered child labor or dangerous factories — just a note that exploitation is relative not absolute, protection is never free, and economic progress proceeds in steps not leaps.

Apple understands that paying slightly higher wages simultaneously pressures their competitors, appeals to western decency, and exploits economically ill-considered aversion to sweatshop labor. But in technology, companies with more competitive advantages than they can possibly exploit should worry about hitting their peak. Having watched first Microsoft and now Google decline after amassing what once seemed to be insurmountable advantages, it is time to ask whether peak Apple is now in sight?

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On September 7, Amazon relented and made a deal to pay sales taxes on shipments to California (no doubt the trenchant analysis that follows persuaded them to do the right thing). For details of the deal see http://goo.gl/kNwjQ.

Now every other state in America needs to make a deal with Amazon — even if they have fewer than California’s 10% of the population. This reinforces the need for Congress to enact a cross-border VAT and to rebate 100% of the funds to the state to which the product ships.

==

Amazon’s refusal to collect sales taxes is bad for the company’s reputation, bad for honest retailers, and bad for state governments. Six states have taken modest steps to level the tax playing field, causing Amazon to respond with a business, political, and legal offensive to protect its tax-avoidance strategy. The first battleground will be California, where Amazon and national retailers will fight a very expensive ballot initiative. Longer term however, Congress should close the unintended sales tax loophole created by Article I of the US Constitution.

One-click Tax Evasion?

Unlike almost every modern country, the US has never had a national sales tax. Most states tax sales within their state but are rightly prevented by the Constitution from taxing out of state transactions. Amazon has turned this important limit on state tax authority into a major piece of its business model. Unfortunately, a smart tactic is becoming a stupid strategy. Congress needs to level its head — and then level the playing field.

From its first day of business, Amazon.com has taken extraordinary measures to avoid collecting sales taxes. It locates distribution centers in low population states to minimize the number of customers for whom it must collect sales taxes. It builds complex software to ensure that every possible product ships across state lines so that customers have no tax obligation. It puts engineers and logisticians to work in shell corporations even if they work on Amazon’s retail website just to avoid creating “taxable nexus” — which obligate Amazon to collect sales taxes. It hires legions of attorneys to minimize and manage the inevitable tax claims. When states like Texas attempt to collect taxes, Amazon retaliates by closing facilities and filing f-you lawsuits. When states declare that Amazon’s hundreds of thousands of third party sellers and affiliates amount to a physical presence in the state, Amazon simply closes the programs — as it did last week in California. Today Amazon went even further: they filed a state ballot initiative in California that will let Californians vote on whether or not to pay sales taxes on third party purchases. National retailers are gearing up for a mammoth fight.

California Turns Green

Amazon is now America’s Number One Tax Evader. The company says that if you buy Hot Freddy’s Thai Salsa from a Los Angeles seller on Amazon, the sales taxes on the transaction are for you and Fred and the state to sort out. Unlike the corner grocery store, they won’t collect these taxes. Nobody disputes that Fred owes taxes on his sales to Californians, but Amazon says that collecting them is Fred’s job, not theirs. Since, as a practical matter, it costs California more to chase Fred than it is worth, Amazon’s policy needlessly costs California tax revenues and denies Californians badly needed public services.

So California sensibly joined five other states that require Amazon to collect sales taxes on the intrastate sales of third party sellers. The law goes further, and declares that third party sellers or affiliates (sites that earn commissions on traffic they send Amazon) constitute taxable nexus — as do subsidiaries. Jerry Brown signed the measure into law on June 30, whereupon Amazon immediately notified all California third party sellers and affiliates that they were discontinuing their program.

Amazon has built its business model around a court decision. In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled  in Quill Corporation v. North Dakota that a state can compel a company to collect taxes only if they have a physical presence, or a nexus, in the state. Absent nexus, the court held that online retailers and mail-order companies can sell products across state lines without collecting the tax. This decision reflects the current law and our national architecture as a republic formed in an era when very few goods were traded across state lines. It also reflects an odd twist in the way the US collects sales taxes: by taxing transactions based on where the seller does business not based on where the buyer lives, we effectively tax selling, not buying. In old fashioned Main Street America it doesn’t matter: every sale is local. But the rise of mail order and online retail meant that our peculiar approach created a giant loophole. I am aware of no other country that makes this mistake.

Your sales taxes have arrived...

The cost of this loophole is huge. According to the New York Times, “The state Board of Equalization, California’s tax collector, estimates the unpaid taxes at $1.15 billion in the last fiscal year, and estimates it will grow to almost $1.2 billion this year and $1.27 billion in 2012.”. For California, this is roughly the size of the state’s cuts to higher education. Not all of these taxes would have been collected by Amazon, but as the largest retail site in the world and the most aggressive defender of the interstate shipping loophole, they symbolize the problem.

Six states, including California, Texas, and Illinois, have now demanded that Amazon collect taxes based on the existence of third party sellers in their state. In each case, Amazon has killed third party and affiliate sales rather than comply. More states are likely to follow. Jeff Bezos has become an outspoken opponent of any move by states to cooperate on taxing cross-border sales and opposes any effort by Congress to resolve the issue. Amazon collects sales tax in only five states — Kansas, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota and Washington — where it has offices or another physical presence (and it suing New York). To avoid collecting taxes in several other states, it simply operates warehouses as subsidiaries which do not sell anything and are not subject to sales taxes. In California, Amazon hires engineers under the name of A9, its search subsidiary, and Lab 129, which digitizes books for the Kindle. In fact, these engineers all contribute directly to Amazon.com retail sales. Amazon does not even operate a search business in California or anywhere else and 100% of Kindle sales take place on Amazon — but Amazon is fighting for its right to use state resources without helping pay for them. A9 hires Silicon Valley engineers but argues that it creates no taxable nexus because it is a separate company and not itself a retailer. The new law makes this impossible. Amazon, of course, is suing.

Once upon a time, policymakers justified online sales tax exemptions on the grounds that e-commerce was an “infant industry” entitled to a break. The infant is now grown: online sales are now almost $200 billion. Soon, a majority of all media (books, movies, music, games) will be purchased online and the online share of many other retail categories will exceed 20%.

Amazon’s policy is narrow and short-sighted. Instead of building a finely tuned sales tax evasion machine, they should help shape a level playing field. Instead of crippling the tax base of states, they should lobby Congress for a national tax on interstate sales. This tax would only apply to goods shipped across state lines — something the commerce clause clearly lets Congress legislate. The taxes would be collected federally but rebated to states according to the ship to address. This would be the first step in rationalizing consumption taxes to actually tax buyers instead of sellers. Amazon could ask for two tax exemptions: for downloaded digital media because it is essentially a service — you cannot resell digital goods as property. Second hand items would be exempt, as they are in many states already, on the grounds that they were taxed once already.

Amazon is not going to do this, so citizens should. We could design the interstate tax as an education tax to build political support. Of course, any such measure would require Congressional tax leadership, a complete oxymoron at the moment. Amazon has effectively made a large business bet that Congress will be unwilling to enact a national consumption tax. But if national retailers and states combine to lobby Congress for a national sales tax on goods shipped across state lines, they have a powerful argument leveling the playing field and closing the loopholes that Amazon has invested far too much IQ figuring out how to exploit.

Besides, Amazon does not need a tax advantage in order to succeed. The company has a built a powerful brand by offering customers a great selection, a fine shopping experience, convenience, and low prices. The low prices are not simply the result of not charging taxes — they are the result of a much more efficient delivery system. Amazon has overhead that is radically lower than retailers like Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, or Sears. Amazon customers are not going to stop shopping online because they have to pay the same sales tax they would pay at the local store. With public pressure for Congressional leadership, Amazon will quickly figure out that the cost of collecting sales taxes is trivial relative to the cost of being branded the nation’s number one tax evader. If ever there were a time for retailers to organize a campaign to boycott Amazon, it is now. Independent booksellers should be especially easy to mobilize, since most are terminally ill and have nothing to lose.

Amazon is is rightly admired by consumers, investors, and business partners. It is suicidal for them to risk this reputation by becoming a poster child for tax evasion. With states struggling to finance basic health and education services and tens of billions of revenue dollars now at stake, Amazon should send a message that it is a public-spirited brand.  It owes us, and itself, a much higher standard of corporate citizenship.

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During the past two months, I have helped three technology startups raise early stage growth capital and casually advised several others. Each business is in a completely different market: mobile, pharma, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, global communications, etc. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses. The entrepreneurs have wildly different backgrounds and personal qualities.

Not all have completed their funding, but in the process each team has learned similar lessons in how best to approach outside investors (investments from friends, family, and fools doesn’t count. They apply different criteria.) Although I managed to raise tens of millions of dollars for early stage businesses, mainly Alibris, I have personally made most of the mistakes listed here and I have made some of them more than once. Nor is this list particularly unique: investors and experienced entrepreneurs write about them all the time.

So here is my list of the top ten mistakes that entrepreneurs make when they try to raise money from outside investors:

1. No story.  Entrepreneurs try to convince investors that they have a winning business – but investors have no idea which businesses will really work. It’s just too complicated. So investors do what human brains are wired to do when confronted with bewildering complexity: they listen for a coherent story. They listen for a particular kind of story that nearly always has three parts: a strong team that achieves impressive traction solving a big problem. These may be called Team has Traction on Trouble or Management has Momentum in a big Market, but to sell your company, you need to tell your version of this story.

2. No pain. Gill Cogan is a savvy financier, a friend, and a former investor of mine. I once pitched a business to him and after ten minutes, he smiled and said, “that’s what we call a vitamin business.” He explained that people often skip their vitamins – but they never skip their painkillers. Investors prefer a painkiller business. Or as another VC put it “what I really like is a tourniquet business”. A solution to a problem that is acutely felt can grow rapidly. A solution to a minor problem may not be a market at all, even if the problem is widespread. VCs do not fund vitamin businesses.

The flip side of no pain is, of course, no gain. More than anything else, investors want to back companies in huge or potentially huge markets. This leads to herd investing: everyone piles into mobile, cloud computing, or gaming. This is why venture investing has always been a fashion business. This looks irrational, but it makes perfect sense even if it kills the Phoenix. To start with, the cost and risk of investing in any startup is high and approximately constant, so why not focus on companies with huge upside? Moreover, fast growing markets put a lot of wind at a startup’s back, which makes errors much less costly. Investors understand what Google’s Eric Schmidt means when he says “rising revenues solves all problems” — so they back companies where explosive revenue growth is most likely. These are markets that solve big problems or capture huge opportunities.

3. No hub. You live in the wrong place. Capital is highly mobile, but capitalists and startup infrastructure are not. They live in Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York and more importantly, so do the entrepreneurs, technologists, researchers, startup attorneys, talented marketing types, engineers, specialized commercial banks, vendors, mentors, and much else. You can raise venture money in Austin, Charlotte, Seattle, LA, Portland, Chicago and a few other places – although investor quality drops precipitously outside of the major hubs. (If you care why and how this occurs and where is it all going, Google AnnaLee Saxenian – a leading scholar on this topic and a fantastic wife to boot). You may be able to raise money if you are not in a place with active venture or angel investors (several companies have, of course) but it’s tougher. If you live outside a funding hub and are serious about building a technology company, it often helps to relocate.

4. No traction. Your company has an idea but no product or service. Or it has a product but no customers. As Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant, two well known investors behind the indispensable site VentureHacks, like to say, “traction speaks louder than words”.

You believe that you have invented a revolutionary new dog food that will quickly disrupt the market. Investors cannot possibly figure out if it is really better, so they look for a metric that is rising rapidly up and to the right – often by 20%/month. Any metric that shows rapidly growing engagement will do. Profit is ideal (if profits are growing fast, you can always raise money — although you may not need to). Revenue growth is next best, even if it is from a tiny base. Next best after that is growth in accounts, beta customers, users, or page views. Worst case, show videos of dogs wagging their tails and survey data from dog owners excited about your products. If you don’t have any signs of traction, you don’t have something that people appear to want. You don’t yet have a business.

As important as traction, is an understanding of why you achieved it and why it will continue. Are users engaging other users? What are your viral metrics? Are large companies buying? Why are they trusting a startup? Are customers buying? What are you offering that others cannot and how do you know? Real data about traffic, conversion, average transaction size, repeat rates, defections, costs, margins, etc. begin to paint a clear picture to investors. Ideas about what you hope will happen are simply no substitute.

5. No team. You love your team, but it may not be financable. Most investors back teams with a combination of proven business and technical experience. Why? A VC who was ex Air Force used to say, “backing entrepreneurs is like picking a pilot for an F-15. I favor the guy who has already crashed one, because he or she really doesn’t want to see that happen again”.  Or more commonly: “we know that good judgment comes from experience – and that experience comes from bad judgment”.

This may seem like a Catch-22, but it is rational. Recent research concluded that a venture-capital-backed entrepreneur who succeeds in a venture has a 30% chance of succeeding in his next venture. By contrast, first-time entrepreneurs have only an 18% chance of succeeding and entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20% chance of succeeding.” The solution? Recruit a co-founder with the skills your team lacks. It does not substitute for product/market traction – but many investors will recognize that your ability to attract talented people is a form of traction.

By the way, there is one glaring sign of a weak team and I see it a lot: relatives in the company, especially on the founding team. Husbands and wives, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, and couples of all sorts. It is rare that the weaker of these individuals would have been hired in a dispassionate search. Having your relatives in the company, especially a spouse, is a great way to signal investors that you are not determined to hire the very best.

6. Lousy communications. A lot has been written about this. Usually what gets called a communication problem is really a business problem. Bad communication is frequently a sign of bad thinking. But there is one communication problem that is chronic to entrepreneurs: over-communicating. You know too much about your business and in early stage conversations, your knowledge is a liability.

The solution is to prepare three sharply focused business summaries: a 15 word “big idea”, a 15 second elevator pitch, and a 15 slide funding pitch. The big idea is the subject line of the email that your trusted intermediary sends the VC. If they were helping you pitch YouTube in 2005, it might have said “Flickr for videos”. If you were pitching Alibris in 1997, it might have said “find millions of out of print books in one online store”. It is not a consumer-facing tag line, it is the cocktail party handle that people will use to describe your business.

The elevator pitch is the most important and most overlooked. Intermediaries who introduce you to investors will use this in the body of their email. You will use it to describe in a few sentences what problem you solve and what traction you are achieving. Bonus points if you can also fluff the team. Marc Andreesen, were he someone who needed money, might have pitched Ning in 2007 by asserting, “Social networks are an amazing, powerful medium. Ning lets any group build it’s own private social network. We recruited a first rate team, we are hosting more than 100,000 user-created networks, and we are growing at 10% per week.” Boom. Hold the elevator – I want to hear more.

Attached to the introductory email is either the 15 page pitch or a one page summary. Either can work. Do not prepare the pitch from scratch — follow a proven recipe like the excellent ones outlined here, here, here, or here. 15 pages, 15 minutes, 30-point type. It  is hard to over communicate in 30-point type.

There are three things that you should not communicate to an investor. Do not show them secrets. Investors share ideas — that’s often how good ideas germinate. They will share yours. Don’t show them an NDA — they won’t sign it. And don’t show them a business plan. You may want a business plan to force yourself to think through your operations and to have something to use to build a founding team, to brief a board member, or to attract talented leaders. But a business plan will not help you raise money because investors won’t read it and they shouldn’t.

7.  High burn. You have ten employees working for cash, nice offices, no product, and no customers. There are PR and law firms on retainer. You are burning faster than you are learning. Remember this: investors are not looking for companies that need money. They look for companies that will succeed whether the investor commits or not. Raising equity is like borrowing: quite often, the more desperately you need money, the less likely you are to get it. If this is you, take heart: you are unlikely, no matter how hard you try, to violate this rule more than I have.

To state the obvious: any business without revenue has to run very lean, even if they start with a million dollars of 3F seed money. You are still trying to fit your product to the market. You are testing, tweaking, selling, and learning. For most web-based businesses, you don’t need titles; you need one or two people who can sell and small team that can build. Pay is low – everyone works long hours for a bunch of stock. As one investor memorably put it, “an early stage business runs like a one story whorehouse: no fucking overhead”.

8.  No cred. Experienced investors listen for a team that shares the details about what it has built. They listen for specific milestones that reflect customer needs met. Weak teams spend more time talking about future plans – their unproven ideas about where to go next. Talk about traction, engagement, measurable progress both in your current business and in past ones. If you worked at a brand name company or went to a brand name school, mention it – but focus on what members of your team have built. You are trying to build a business, so your record of what you have built gives your team credibility.

9.  No insight into sales or distribution. Early stage companies often don’t know what they don’t know about sales or distribution. This is understandable because early stage companies are obsessed with building a product or a service to fit a market. Achieving product/market fit, or traction, or engagement is hard, critically important work. When it finally happens, it is like a deep sea fish striking your baited line – customers start pulling the product from your hands. You know it instantly (recall the crazy moment in the Social Network where Facebook suddenly goes viral at Harvard).  Getting to this point is the obsession of every startup team. As a result, most are not yet obsessing about sales and distribution.

But they will. Sales and distribution challenges vary all over the map, but most in most companies there are large learning curves and scale effects. Your customer acquisition costs drop as you get bigger and smarter. But in the beginning, you don’t really know how much it costs to acquire customers. The number is likely to be much bigger than you imagined. Which means you can burn through a lot more cash in year one than you expected to.

Put another way, traction can be a trap because it leads entrepreneurs to try to get as much capital as possible out of their growth. This is completely backwards. The point of starting a company is to get as much growth as possible out of your capital.

10. No lawyers. Entrepreneurs, with rare exception, did not go to law school or if they did, they did not pass the bar and become lawyers. New entrepreneurs often dislike lawyers – but they quickly learn that good lawyers matter. A lot.

Once investors are shareholders, their interests are substantially aligned with yours. Until they are shareholders however, the economic interest of an entrepreneur and an investor are opposed. Investors want to buy low; entrepreneurs want to sell high. And the terms, which can be bewildering to a new entrepreneur, matter a lot (as many a VC has said, “you can set the price, if I can set the terms”. They mean it.) In this situation, an entrepreneur needs legal counsel at least as competent as that enjoyed by investors. Day to day, a low cost lawyer is fine. For a major financing however, get a good lawyer who does startup financings for a living.

That’s my list of ten common errors. It is not comprehensive: you could no doubt put together a list of ten others. Nor is it universally right: every generalization has exceptions, including this one. And avoiding these mistakes is no guarantee that you will attract an investor. In raising money, most entrepreneurs kiss a lot of frogs before they find a prince. Then again, so do investors.

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I embed Jobs’ fascinating talk above. As usual, it is a tour de force. Jobs proves himself constitutionally incapable of touting a company line. When Apple is messing up, he says so. When he disagrees with management, he says so. When he is being outvoted on something, he complains. He has just been invited back in to Apple and is a consultant — but he respectfully and happily disses executives, managers, and product developers. He announces that some of them have done nothing in years. Several times he lays out an alternative path before noting wistfully that “it’s not my decision”.

Second, he describes his vision of the future. At about 14 minutes, he discloses that whether he is at Pixar, at home, or at work, he never loses a file, has the wrong version, or even has to back them up because Apple has a large server that replicates his content immediately, so he always has the current file.

When asked about Newton, the underwhelming Apple PDA, he comments on the impossibility of supporting three operating systems, noting that two (back then Rhapsody and AppleTalk) was an enormous job. Then he acknowledges that the device isn’t helpful because it has no keyboard and is not connected. “Who wants to use a little scribbly stylus? I don’t. ” If it were connected and had a keyboard, I’d use it in a heartbeat and I would not care what operating system it used.”

This week, Jobs gave the 2011 World Wide Developer Conference keynote and he finally brought this vision to market. Processors are now fast enough, storage now cheap enough, mobile bandwidth now high enough, and the Apple mobile ecosystem now developed enough that he could launch iCloud. It is the foundation of a unique and consistent vision of cloud computing that is quite different from Amazon or Google’s.

It is also the last major piece of the Apple puzzle. The company will continue to innovate and is likely to become very large — but the boundaries of the business are now clearly set. For years we have seen Apple expand its boundaries: an MP3 player, a phone, a tablet. Restructure every media business: music, movies, books, periodicals, and games. Cloud integration is the last piece of this vision, which is why your grandchildren will recognize today’s Apple.

Apple wants to use the cloud differently than Amazon or Google, mostly by keeping it invisible. Amazon EC2 sells cloud services that let you can host your applications or content on cloud servers. Google serves you apps that are cloud hosted, so you can use them with a browser any time you are connected. Apple wants the cloud in the operating system, under the hood, and out of the way. To use the new tag line introduced at WWDC, it should “just work”. 

Apple has rewritten core apps with instant content replication built in. Note that it is never called synchronization or replication. Content is available everywhere, but never called content. Your music, photos, documents, presentations, or spreadsheets are not even called files — indeed Apple has rejected the whole idea of a file system in favor of devices connected to the cloud. A cloud is “much more than a hard disk in the sky” because “the truth is always in the cloud” and because you need pay it no attention at all.

It is, once again, an audacious vision. Among other things, it deprecates computers to mere devices — peers of tablets and phones. It also means that your Macs, iPad, and iPhone will soon become impossible to steal because they are joined at the cloud. As a result, every owner could brick then locate a stolen device. (You can do this today with software like Hidden, which helps people recover stolen computers by taking photos and screenshots of the bad guy. Local news reported a hysterical local example here). Like every major operating system upgrade– especially one that supports a revolutionary change in computing architecture, it  makes certain products and companies obsolete (Dropbox and Sugar Sync had a bad week — as did Instapaper). 

iCloud is the last piece of the vision Jobs brought to the company starting in 1997. The company will continue to grow geographically. It will continue to bring out innovative new products, including, one hopes, a giant flat screen TV, which is really just a large monitor. Software will improve forever and new books, music, movies, games, and magazines will always educate and entertain. Apple will acquire and integrate a few other companies including, hopefully, Netflix and Twitter.

But all of these activities will be coloring in the business that Jobs has now fully outlined. Jobs has been pushing new boundaries for Apple since he rejoined in 1997. With iCloud, the outline is complete and, in a profound way, Steve’s work is done.

Jobs did not look fantastic in his talk — but his trademark audacity was everywhere on display. He really would have made a good King of France, or even a revolutionary Danton (“De l’audace. Encore de l’audace. Et toujours de l’audace.”) Clearly he is suffering the effects of the Whipple procedure that saved his life from pancreatic cancer. Hopefully he has many productive years ahead of him. But even if he doesn’t, he can retire knowing that his vision, on display for many, many years, has given the world delightful products, a valuable company, and an exemplary and powerful brand. That Jobs has done this in multiple industries is inspiring. Reality distortion field or no, I feel lucky to be on the same planet as this guy.

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I have always loved printed books. I like discovering them and reading them. I like how they look, feel, and smell. I like rooms filled with books like the reading room of the British Museum or the New York Public Library or the rare book room at Shakespeare’s. I like the cluttered shelves of professor’s offices and books that become like old friends.  (Lawyers offices I like less. Identical leather bound volumes suggest a rigid mind. Doesn’t do it for me). 

If I visit your house, I will head for your public bookshelves. Scanning what you display and claim to read tells me about you. If you visit my house, you will find loaded bookshelves in the bathrooms, the bedrooms, and the basement. To say nothing of the offices.  

I love bookstores. I like discovering books but I also like seeing and smelling that many books. For many years when our kids were little, my wife and I had a babysitter show up every other Saturday night, just so we would get some time together. We were often too tired to plan real dates, so as I backed the car out of the driveway, I’d say “where to?”. We quite often ended up at a bookstore — our idea of a hot Saturday night. 

I started an online book company to support small bookstores and frequently preached the endurance of printed books. “Books have been around for five centuries. We believe in the form factor. If you don’t, you should not invest in this business”. I often joked that only eBook company CEOs actually read eBooks. Until recently, I not only bought more printed books than electronic ones, I also bought more books in stores than online. 

For me, it’s hard to imagine a life without printed books. But each year starting now, paper books will get scarcer, brick and mortar bookstores will become tougher to sustain, and the odds that I learn what you are reading from your shelves diminishes. For my grandkids, printed books will be like old maps: wonderous objects worthy of reverence — but nothing you’d actually use. 

In reporting earnings today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos noted that his company had achieved two milestones. Amazon enjoyed its first ten billion dollar quarter (when I entered the online book business in 1997, Amazon sales were about ten million dollars a month — 3 thousand times smaller than today).

More significantly however, was the reason for this growth.

“Kindle (electronic) books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com. Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected.”

Amazon is not the entire economy, of course. Most books are still printed — but the shift to electronic books is accelerating, thanks to exploding sales of readers — especially iPads and Kindles.

As soon as 2013 and certainly by 2015, consumers will buy more electronic books than printed books. Outside of college towns and large cities, music stores disappeared five years ago — even though MP3 players integrated with online stores are only a decade old (the first iPod did not come out until two weeks after 9/11. Full iTunes integration and the acquisition of a lot of music took a bit longer).

As Mary Meeker’s chart from the recent Web 2.0 conference illustrates, iPad, iPod, and iPhone (all workable readers) adoption has been much faster than any technology in history. Faster than browsers and faster than DVDs. And her data exclude Kindles and Nooks.

Unlike music, supply is not a constraint on the growth of this market. Amazon has been patiently building its eBook inventory for years, long before sales could possibly justify it (I seriously doubt that Amazon has yet to see a dollar of profit on eBooks if you measure all eBook costs to date vs all eBook revenues). Whereas music was content constrained for years, books have arguably been device constrained until recently.

No longer: today, Amazon announced that 

“The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 810,000 books including New Releases and 107 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers. Over 670,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 74 New York Times Bestsellers. Millions of free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.

800,000 books is not every book, by a long shot. But it is almost every popular book and when you add Google books and the Open Content Alliance, the total number of scanned titles surely approaches ten million. Not all of these are available commercially, yet — but most will be within a few years. (Few people read more than a 2-3 thousand books in a lifetime anyway. The average is surely no more than a hundred).

The availability of very high quality reading software built for a variety of platforms is also not a constraint.

“Amazon added to its growing list of “Buy Once, Read Everywhere” Kindle apps, launching a Kindle app for Windows Phone 7. In addition, the Kindle for Android app was updated to enable users to buy, read and sync over 100 Kindle newspapers and magazines. All Kindle apps let customers “Buy Once, Read Everywhere”–on Kindle, Kindle 3G, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry and Android-based devices. All Kindle apps are free and incorporate Amazon’s Whispersync technology, which allows readers to seamlessly switch between devices.

Finally, storage is not a contraint. 

“With Kindle Worry-Free Archive, books purchased from the Kindle Store are automatically backed up online in the Kindle library on Amazon where they can be re-downloaded wirelessly for free, anytime.

Digital reading is becoming so normal that it will soon be hard to find people who do not read digitally. Already, some magazines are not available in print. There will be the usual death throes: publishers will fight retailers over the cost of book returns (a big but not avoidable cost of brick and mortar retailing). These wars will brief and destructive to both sides.

Borders will close its doors this year. Barnes and Noble may remain open only because they will move out of book sales. They seem likely to take up clothing or electronics or gift cards or coffee. Or furniture or typewriters. Or something.

There are winners, of course. Device makers win (Amazon, Apple). Electronic retailers win (Amazon, Apple). Publishers who get out in front win (Smart: Wall St. Journal, Economist. Dumb: New Yorker, New York Times. Hopeless: magazines and book publishers who refuse to release electronic copies).

Books have had a good run. I am going to miss them.

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For good reason, California never shared my enthusiasm. Diesel engines coughed up a lot of particulate, which ended up suspended over Los Angeles, especially near the ports, where hundreds of trucks would idle for hours waiting to load and unload. In many areas, including Oakland, asthma rates near the port skyrocketed.

Europe didn’t mind a bit of soot. Partly because Rudolf Diesel was European, (born in France to German parents who fled to England) diesel was very well established in Europe by WWII, a war fought almost entirely with diesel engines on the ground, air, and seas. 

After the war, European cities often stank of diesel fumes from trucks, trains, and cars. Diesel is significantly cheaper to refine than gasoline (although the economics of limited distribution means it often costs no less in the US).

Soon the EU required that cars with engines bigger than two liters of displacement run on diesel. Today 60% of all cars in Europe are diesel, compared with 5% in the US. Over time, the EU forced diesel to clean up its act — reducing permitted particulate from 50ppm to 10ppm since the 1980s. The forthcoming Euro 6 standard meets California emission standards, which are among the highest in the world. Diesels in both the EU and the US now burn almost exclusively ultra low sulfur diesel and unlike clean coal, clean diesel is actually very clean.

The result of our different histories makes a visit to Europe torturous for American dieselheads. The roads are full of practical, attractively priced German and even French and Italian diesels. The BMW 520d, for example, is a spacious sedan or wagon that gets better gas mileage than a Toyota Prius — more than 50 miles per gallon. But you cannot buy a 520d in the US — only a 335d, which is a smaller car with a racer’s engine. Any Series 5 BMW sold in the US gets half the mileage of a 520d — if it is going downhill with a stiff tailwind.

To date, German carmakers have introduced diesel into the US only for vehicles that are either very big or very small. BMW carries the compact 335d and its SUVs; Mercedes offers the E320 or an SUV for about the same $60k price. Both have cramped rear seating and are chock full of fiddly gadgets that cost a lot to fix (heated windshield water for your rain-detecting wipers, anyone?). Audi sells the miniscule A3 in diesel as well as the overpowered Q7 SUV. 

Which leaves Volkswagen, Audi’s parent and my favorite car company. Most people know that Volkswagen was founded during the Third Reich. Fewer people know is that it was the Nazi trade union, the German Labor Front that developed plans for an affordable car and pressed Adolf Hitler to back it. At a time when the average German rode motorcycles, not cars, the union persuaded Hitler to sponsor a “Volkswagen” program. Hitler dictated that a “People’s Car” had to be able to carry two adults and three children at 100 km/h.

Hitler also backed an innovative scheme to make the cars affordable. Early VWs cost about 30 weeks income for the average German worker. The program enabled people to buy a VW by saving for it over four years and earning interest, not by borrowing and paying interest. (Germans learned to hate debt when the Wiemar Republic collapsed and hyperinflation helped usher in the Nazis). The slogan, still recalled when I lived in Germany in the late sixties was “Fünf Mark die Woche musst Du sparen, willst Du im eigenen Wagen fahren” — “You must save Five Marks a week if you want to drive your own car”. More than 330,000 people eventually paid into the Volkswagen program (VW reportedly repaid unclaimed deposits after the war).

Hitler built an all new factory for VW in what is now Wolfsburg and chose a famous Mercedes designer, Ferdinand Porsche, to design the car. Porsche and his engineers delivered an air-cooled, flat-four, rear-mounted engine housed in a distinctive round shape vehicle that emerged from his pioneering use of a wind tunnel to reduce aerodynamic drag. Porsche went on, of course, to found a legendary sports car company, which used many VW components over the years. It seemed only fair two years ago, that Porsche bought control of Volkswagen.

By rights, VW should not have survived World War II. It’s factory had been bombed and the Allies limited Germany to rebuilding only 10% of its former car industry (the logic of this was obviously political, not economic).

But Wolfsburg was in the British zone, and the British Major in charge, Ivan Hirst, discovered that much of VW’s machinery had survived the war. Attracted to the car’s clever design, Hirst organized and helped finance the resumption of production. He exported to Britain the first Beetles, as the cars were soon known. Today, Hirst is credited with saving Volkswagen.

By the early 1950s, sales of VWs were growing rapidly in North America and became a symbol of a new Germany. Success was due in part to a new factory in Canada and to the clever and stylish advertising campaigns by Helmut Krone and the upstart New York agency of Doyle, Dane, Bernbach.

By the 1960s and 1970s, VW busses and bugs had become powerful symbols of independence and even dissent for young people who bought the cars in droves. Many of us drove our bugs or buses until the engine died (the #3 cylinder never cooled well and always went first). No matter – you could rebuild the engine yourselfusing a hand illustrated book published by a hippie named John Muir (who took the remarkable step of assuring women that they were up to the task. Many discovered that they were). We developed a strong emotional attachment to Volkswagens that in my case has been reproduced by only one other large company — Apple. I have long suspected that Steve Jobs once owned a VW. 

VW pioneered not only a people’s air-cooled gas engine, they pioneered diesel technology as well. VW has sold more than 50 million vehicles powered by the company’s innovative TDI (Turbocharged Direct Injection) engine. Diesel engines are 30% more efficient than equivalent gas engines and emit fewer greenhouse gases. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, four of the ten most fuel-efficient vehicles available for sale in the U.S. in 2004 were powered by Volkswagen TDI engines.

I vividly recall driving a Passat TDI in Italy for six weeks in 2003, the year that VW introduced diesel engines. The car was fast, strong, and quiet. It got 40 miles/gallon (100km on a little more than 5 liters) even with luggage, kids, and hills. It was a stunning vehicle and nearly a decade later cars with a TDI badge populate every street in Europe and are common in South America, or Asia. 

I began dropping by VW every year or two to see when I could get one. But VW and Audi introduced diesel to the states only in very big cars and very small ones. The Jetta came with a TDI, bu was so small that I had to slouch to fit in it — not great for driving. And with large teenage boys, the back seat was a nonstarter.  

Until this weekend.

When my mechanic advised me that the continually flashing lights meant that my Audi wagon needed more work than it was worth, I paid another visit to VW. Again I tried sitting in the 2010 Jetta TDI Sedan and Sportswagen — a sweet design. I tried lowering the driver’s seat all the way and tipping the seat way back, but my head still smacked hard into the roof. I tested a car without a sunroof — slightly better, but the back seat was a disaster.

Then the sales guy said “instead of the 2010, try the 2011 Jetta – they made it a lot bigger”.

What!? It turns out that VW sized the 2011 Jetta for Yanks. It is 3″ longer and a half inch wider, but it they lowered the seats and made remarkable use of the added space.  (For 2011, the Jetta has to fill in for the Passat, which is being redesigned for assembly in Chattanooga, Tennessee and was just relaunched for 2012).

VW will finally offer the TDI engine, but in the meantime, the 2011, sixth generation Jetta is all grown up. It has a massive trunk and back seat — both bigger than the 2010 Passat, Camry, or Accord. It comes with the same 2.0 TDI engine that got me 40+ miles/gallon while tearing through Italy. And unlike my Audi wagon, VW sells the car with a manual transmission. 

Within 3 days, it was Auf Wiedersehen, Audi. I found a mechanic to hook up a PC and disable the annoying electronic beeps and chirps. Once the Jetta was jailbroken, I re-badged it from “JETTA TDI” to “JEDI” – which is what they shoulda named it anyway.

The force is with this car – and I have not had that reaction to an automobile since I was 18 and drove my first bug. The 2011 Jetta TDI is strong, precise, capacious, and green. The build and the appointments are good but not luxurious (the stripped down gas Jetta is $15,000 car; with TDI and goodies it’s $23k).

Like many of VW’s best sedans, Jetta is named for a wind — in this case the Jet Stream. (the old Sirocco was name for a Mediterranean desert wind, Golf is from Golfstrom or Gulf Stream, and Passat is German for trade wind). 

With an impressive diesel lineup and a new US factory, VW is preparing to confront the hybrid onslaught. They need to find a new Helmut Krone and bring back the ads because for the first time in awhile, Volkswagen has something to shout about.

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NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES WITH COLLEGE DEGREES

What is going on? Conservative economists have pounced: we are educating people for jobs that do not and will not exist. This is obviously a mad subsidy of the education monopolists by precious federal tax dollars.  Well, they may have a point. Why invest in a college education for someone who doesn’t need it? Indeed, if 17 million people have degrees but work in jobs that do not require them, were these individuals not defrauded?

The core of the economic argument is that the marginal value of a college degree and the average value are diverging sharply. On average, college degrees confer better jobs and higher earnings, so public policy and private preferences tend to urge kids towards college. But many perfectly decent (and in some cases perfectly vacant) jobs do not require college degrees. In a recession especially, some of those jobs are filled by people who are overqualified. 

In tighter labor markets however, you might get a different story. You might discover that a fair share of waiters, laborers, janitors, truck drivers, food preparation workers, and hotel desk clerks are recent graduates with no intention of turning their current job into a career. It ain’t evidence, but I held each of these jobs as a college graduate and many others not on the list. It didn’t kill me and probably made me a better leader when those opportunities came my way. Customer Service Reps often move into marketing and other jobs in their company — and there is a strong case that every manager should spend time as a CSR.

You also might learn that college grads hold some of these jobs because, shocking though it will be to economists to learn this, they are not maximizing their earnings. The reason that a quarter of all “Amusement and Recreation Attendants” have college degrees is almost surely that they like working at resorts. The economy is full of surf, ski, and scuba instructors with college degrees. There are days when many of us would gladly trade places with them. Flight attendants may relish an opportunity to travel. Parents may need jobs that give them flexible schedules. In short, the economics of the marginal employment decision may not reflect the average any better than the quality of the marginal college degree does. 

Then there is the question of whether education is an investment or an expensive act of personal consumption. Surely many people think of it as an investment. To the extent they do, professors should worry if returns on educational investments decline and/or the number of investors declines for demographic reasons. On the other hand, it may be that education is actually a consumer good with lasting benefits. Thinking about it this way has benefits. Economists may have trouble measuring it, but most people understand that education may be overconsumed — but it is rarely wasted. 

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