Sunday’s readers were treated to a NYTimes Editorial Board Grand Pontification.

Really?! – done in the style of Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers and Amy Pohler.
Glad to see that NYTimes Editorial Board has paved the way for getting action in this Congress by helping to control the GOP lynch mobs that are determined to show that Obama is worse  as President than his predecessor , is  an unrepentant socialist, and  is foisting  so-called “unworkable policies” with draconian regulations upon the public.

Really?! – good to see that the NYTimes commits the sin of burying its climate change stories three levels deep in the menus and then asks rhetorically in one of those buried climate change stories “Scientists agree overwhelmingly on global warming, why doesn’t the public know that?“. Why not Global Warming as a front page topic in the top lefthand menu equal to Business and Science? Why not a permanent Climate Change Section that shows 1)the major causes, 2)the major contributors by country to CO2  and how they have changed yearly for the past 10 years, then 20 years ago, and  ten 40 years ago? Why not feature in the same permanent pages a summary of the major climate change technologies -solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc versus the cost. Then give readers an updated picture of whats changing in these major CO2 containment strategies. I want the NYTimes to be a one stop spot for the status of climate change. Do  that and I will subscribe in a flash.

Really?! – There is not enough problems on the President’s plate  like gun reform, GITMO, Immigration Reform, Infrastructure programs, Budget and Deficit Ceilings, Syria/Iran/Pakistan/North Korea etc, etc. Oh and the President is working with a GOP Congress that is willing from President Obama’s first inauguration, to obstruct  defeat, and otherwise sabotage almost all his policies and programs. The President is still waiting for first term judicial appointments, many key cabinet and regulatory posts, plus  executive policies to be approved by Congress. Does the NYTimes help the public keep tabs on their Do Nothing GOP dominated Congress with a spreadsheet of what is pending. Ahhh, in the spirit of the GOP ….NO!

Really?! – we are told that US corporates are changing their positions on climate change. Really? Does the NYTimes provide a spreadsheet of the current major corporations, how much they spend opposing vs promoting climate change and what their current positions are? No!

Really?! – Climate change is a global problem so do we have a NYTimes spreadsheet showing the status of climate change policy and spending in the OECD, BRIC and OPEC countries? Guess what…No! Just piecemeal stories and reports.

So Really! Until the NYTimes gets off its petard and really supports Climate Change in its pages – it will be like most major news media today: part of the problem, not part of the solution. Really, the problem of climate change will be non-partisan, catastrophic and in the very near future – will NYTimes be a leader or just Pontificators?

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In the Coursera class Behavioral Economics taught by  Duke Professor Dan Ariely, all the students had to write a mid-term  essay in which they described the ideas of Behavioral Economics  and how the methods of the discipline  could be used to solve an economic problem. Despite the fact, that most of the methods in the class to date applied to individual economic decision making, the methods appeared to be robust enough to be applied to social and political problems. So  my essay would try to do 3 things – 1)summarize the general outlines of Behaviorial Economics, 2)highlight areas where social and political processes were influenced by Behaviorial Economics and 3)then apply those methods to a social problem.

The Problem: Voter Ignorance and Apathy in National Elections

Behaviorial Economics and Irrational Behavior are departures from the  standard Utility and Preferences  theory of both decision making and economic choice. Each discipline relies on utility theory and remembered/internalized preferences as being the drivers of  behavior. But this course has shown how many departures from the standard utility  model can be shown to occur almost unconsciously yet consistently across ages, national boundaries, gender and social groups. In short, Behavioral Economics describes the conditions when individuals and small groups depart from the classic rational model of economic choice and start to consistently exhibit  ”irrational” behaviors such as loss aversion, pain of payment, and relative anchoring versus the expected absolute valuation among other departures from the rational.

Kahneman and Tversky - established fast and slow decision making  with startlingly different mental models and neural pathways. See the paper at  bit.ly/u9nNZ2. System 1 is fast and can be shown to link  the limbic or primitive automatic brain structures to fast, instinctive decisions. System 1 is intuitive, rapid, and designed for situations where gut feeling or intuitive quick response  is required [think fight or flight, honest emotional response, etc]. System 2 is slower, deliberate and is used to analyze, examine and vet more closely System 1 responses. System 2 can be mapped to the cortex and frontal lobes of humans and comprises the new brain functions.   People take all sorts of shortcuts and conscious/unconscious irrational behaviors to cope with the flood and complexity of decisions throughout daily life switching between System 1 vs System 2 responses as time, costs, and previous decision success dictate.
Camerer - describes the above and other work as “behavioral economics represents a reunification of psychology and economics, rather than a brand new synthesis, because early thinking about economics was shot through with psychological insight” and goes on to provide 4 models of  how economics can be modified by insights on the psychology of not-always rational behavior. See this overview paper at bit.ly/13XTTRf
Kenrick et alia - describe Deep Rationality as being based on evolutionary roots which show decision making modes with  strong evolutionary fitness components – so Economics+Psychology+Evolution of  Behavior Rules are seen as  tightly linked - see  this novel view  at 1.usa.gov/14kpkEK
Sunstein - shows how the behaviorial economics of Choice Architectures has influenced government policymaking.The dramatic difference between Opt-out vs Opt-in organ donor cards illustrates the  power choice architecture has on decisions – see major ideas and references at  bit.ly/TExfUz

So this course has moved from bounded rationality in individual economic decision making, the traditional domain of Behaviorial Economics, to the examination of irrationality in group/political decision making. The chart  below tracks this broader scope:

Note the group or social element and how decisions in either domain transition between group and individual

Professoor Ariely has shown how many individual decision situations are influenced by group or social  factors. Salient examples are  the social  vs market/money norms on gifts or free work . Another is the role of social proof in the constant low-level of dishonesty which appears to bypass Becker’s Benefits versus Cost of Being Caught analysis.  Thus, the week 3 lectures and readings on Dishonesty a)clearly plunked the course into social/group norms  and b)provided surprising results on how cheating is influenced by group and social factors.

Clearly decisions about social morality and norms are  at the crux of the matter in many current events. For example, Too Big To Fail  and Too Big To Jail Wall Street Malfeasance - bit.ly/XXmscU ,Boston Marathon Bombers Radicalization,  and the foundering of Gun Background Checks in Congress - bit.ly/XYD8TE. All of the phenomenon have great dollops of  Irrational Behaviors in a social as well as individual decision making context. So how can we hope to address the Politics of Voting Behavior using Behaviorial Economics when the scope is so vast?

The Political Problem

At the same time as this course I am taking  Coursera’s Democratic Development which agrees with the Economist’s Democracy Index - bit.ly/Xpd4vb that identifies free and fair elections based on an active and informed  electorate as a pillar of effective democratic government. The problem is that voter participation rates can be very low in the World and the US especially. Voter turnout for the Presidential elections have seen an uptick from 1988′s historical low of 49.0% to 57.1% in 2008 and then 57.9% in 2008 and 2012. - bit.ly/oVYJdG. The quality of a Democracy is in direct proportion to the informed state  and willingness to vote of the electorate. Unfortunately, in many Democracies including the US, the famous line of Walt Kelly’s Pogo applies – “We have met the enemy and They is US”.

And if one looks at the classical model for voting, P*B+D > C where P=probability vote will  count for the favored candidate winning, B=the benefits derived from the candidate winning, D= derived gratification from voting, C=Cost in time, effort,  and financial expenses to vote, there is ample room for irrational factors to come into play. In fact the consensus is that adding incentives to vote are a)illegal and b)hardly  guarantee an informed vote.bit.ly/12J1wIu But on helping people become more informed, the view is surprisingly more positive. Shineman argues if you mobilize them they become more informed - bit.ly/XXPwRN  Knight Foundation has a contest devoted to the challenge of informing voters in in an unbiased fashion on key issues- there are 40 innovative policies kng.ht/12DU9Vk.  So the problem of getting out the vote and having an informed electorate seems approachable. But lets step back and get an overview of elections.

Elections 101

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision in 2010 removed many of the Watergate and other restrictions on campaign financing, the 2010 and 2012 elections have grown dramatically in campaign spending. For example, the 2012Federal  election is estimated to have cost $6billion compared to $5.2 billion in 2008, a 15% growth rate. But the 2012 federal campaign  spending  figure may be too low due to changes in the  tax code and federal reporting requirements. In the States, campaign spending for 2012 amounted to $2.6B. Estimates for total 2012 federal, state and local campaign spending Certainly elections are a multi-billion and growing industry.

So inevitably this amount of spending has  attracted a lot of attention and some interesting approaches on how to run a campaign. Catherine Shaw’s The Campaign Manager is a highly-rated book describing  the latest campaign strategies and policies with a specific eye to local elections. This is an electoral how to manual. In contrast,Green and Gerber’s Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout recommends a more disciplined and experimental approach that attempts to measure what various campaign policies cost versus the number of voters they turnout. They use Behavioral Economic methods and then test all campaign strategies by seeing what happens in the different sections of an electoral district in which carefully controlled tests of campaign methods are used. In short, Green and Gerber are trying to establish tested measures of campaign effectiveness. Given the billions of dollars being spent in elections, this new vigor inspired by Social Psychology and Behavioral Economics is long overdue.

Another recent book,The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy, examines  how  the Social Sciences are beginning to have a profound effect on Public PolicyMaking. There are a number of areas where the Behaviorial Economics have been applied and these policies echo the notable work of Cass Sunstein’s Simpler strategy for better government in which  techniques such as Defaults Options, Choice Architecture, and choice simplification have been used to substantially change how the federal government deals with the public over the past four years. Significantly, the Behavioural Foundation’s book underlines how   Behavioral Economics guest lecturer Todd Rogers has been able to enhance voter turnout dramatically  in election campaigns.

This is significant because despite the huge amount of moneys spent on election campaigns, the campaign teams only knew by anecdotal references how effective their mobilization techniques might be. Todd points out how in the last 3 major elections a shift has taken place towards using  Behavioral Economics methods. The classic  rational voter model of mobilization is supplemented by adding  to the call or leaflet scripts 1) plan making nudges,  2)immediate identity as being a voter, 3)social herding by referencing how big a turnout is expected. But the most effective technique depended on simple social pressure . Adding an innocent accountability note “We may call you post election to find out about your  voting experience” added to the script increased mobilization effectiveness by as much as 40%. Clearly new, small behavioral nudges are having major impacts on elections. Hopefully, studies on what methods are truly effective in election campaigns will help clear out the current tsunami of attack ads.

Summary

What became evident from the the above readings and books, is that methods derived from Behavioral Economics are indeed being used in addressing both voter ignorance and apathy in federal elections. The success of the methods  has been largely positive in voter mobilization and helpful in addressing voter awareness of critical issues. More broadly, Behavioral Economics and Social Psychology are just now being used to address the issues of making the federal government and its myriad of regulations simpler and more effective for the public in major, behind the scenes revisions to how the government interacts with the public. Finally, let me say that though the topic was political, voting behaviour, many of the arguments made in the voting changes were simple business ROI-Return on Investment. Also anyone trying to confine the new behavioral studies and research to economics only are self-herding themselves in the wrong direction.

PostScript 

As you can see, my essay ballooned up to nearly double the legal limit of 805 words in the class exercise. But in my defense, I would point to the various required and suggested readings  in the course and point out their length put my scrawny offering to shame lengthwise but hopefully not information or utility wise.

Speaking of readings, one can see with the essay’s numerous book references, that Dan precipitated a mini-gold rush for Amazon.com. So in that spirit let me list my 5 favorite books and/or readings  for the course:
Kahneman - Thinking Fast and Slow is a very readable exploration of Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning research into modes of thinking. This is the foundation for much of Behavioral Economics.
Wikipedia - the list of cognitive biases with references. Because it is wikipedia should not mean it is taboo. This  is a great starting point and reference check.
Sunstein  - Simpler: The Future of Government shows how Behavioral Economic principles are being used now to make government  simpler and more effective. This book disproves the notion that governance can only be made better by making it smaller or cutting it out altogether.
Dan Ariely - The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves. The most interesting part of the course was the experiments which show a persistent low level of cheating and then the manipulation of the fudge factor  or the narratives we tell to maintain our sense of  being honest.
Cialdini – Influence: Science and Practice is another advocate of testing methods of persuaion and influence which show the social side of bounded rationality.

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On  Google Plus, one can find circles and communities where it is possible to have civil discussions. Here is an example. The card to the left was posted and got 10 +clicks and 3 repostings. One of the comments was notable.

I am ambiguous about this notion – and it is fundamental. Are there enough jobs to go around? If you are over 55 the  ”no one is hiring” is true. If your skills are primarily to be used in a manufacturing or assembly line shop, large or small, “no one will be hiring” for 3 reasons:
1)globalization and free trade means someone likely in Southeast Asia will do the work for such a fraction of your necessary living wage that the job and work will be done there. The labor cost savings will out weigh additional costs of transportation and support;
2)Companies are working triple overtime to replace workers with a new generation of smart machines that never get tired, work anytime and for any length – and can be replaced if they “wear out” at much lower cost than humans. Just watch the recent set of GE commercials selling “smart machines”.;
3)Even in the non-manufacturing arenas of support, marketing, finance, innovation, and administration – a new wave of global outsourcing is going on. So the fall back options are becomng ever smaller.

I remember going to the 1964 Worlds Fair in New York where flying cars and 20 hour work weeks were the promise of the Fair. The flying cars never happened but the 20 hour work week at subsistence wages, instant layoffs, and forget any benefits is becoming increasingly the new “working dynamic”.

Will mass customization and a underground barter economy arise? It already has where I live. Will it be enough to stave off mass social unrest? Not sure.

Now this is by no means the typical comment; but that it happens without troll-like surlishness is welcome. Even more interesting is that in Google+ Communities like the Art of Photo Post-processing or WordPress, the commentary and discussions can be extended and fruitful. Not sure how long it will last but it is refreshing improvement over say Slashdot or Reddit where trolls still abound like stray wolves, striking suddenly and snuffing out good chats.

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Brett Arends has a very interesting post on MarketWatch  - Why the NewsMedia is Worse Than You Think. He states his case succinctly:

There have been the high profile goofs — by CNN, in its coverage of the Boston bombings, and by Howard Kurtz, the famous media “critic,” in a blog post about gay athlete Jason Collins. The Tribune Company faces a potential takeover by the, er, colorful Koch brothers.And it all comes, with perfect timing, on the tenth anniversary of the exposure of Jayson Blair, the serial fabulist, at the New York Times.

It’s become a cliché these days to say you don’t trust the media. But you know what? You’re right not to do so.The problems aren’t as bad as they appear. They are much, much worse.

Arends advances five arguments as to why News Media today are bad:
1)Speed of the Never Ending Web News Cycle – the old cycle was once a week with major news magazines and once a day for newspapers. This allowed more time to get the story right. Now to compete with the likes of Twitter, Facebook and a thousand one immediate news blogs, major news organizations have little time to do the fact checking and journalist corroboration that marked their work from a decade or more ago. Things slip between the cracks.

2)The Current Press Economics - Arends is bitterly sharp here :

A media outlet recently advertised a job for “an experienced writer” with a “solid” record of publishing articles in outlets such as the New York Times, National Geographic and so on. Salary? The job was unpaid. The posting was reported by Jim Romenesko, the media writer. It was not an isolated incident. A major non-profit media outlet known to me is looking for columns from top-quality writers. The pay? Fifty bucks an item. Good luck with that. A liberal media doyenne [Ariana Huffington] praised President Obama for demanding an increase of the minimum wage, but doesn’t pay her bloggers anything at all.

The NYTimes turned the corner this year earning more from its online than print properties. But this has been 5 years of economically austere times for not just the NYTimes but most print media – online incomes are a fraction of their in-hand counterparts which are declining inexorably in circulation. This has meant cutbacks in staff and coverage and the outright shutting down of many newspapers and magazines. Coverage and nitty gritty investigative reporting has dwindled and suffered. ROI for stories must be in a week if not a day.

3)Compromise for News Access – Again, Arends is pointed and caustic.

In early 2007, when the subprime crisis first blew up, some executives at big mortgage lending companies were going around telling everyone that their companies were okay. But I reported at the time that several of these executives were also quietly dumping stock in their own companies as fast as they could. Six months later one of the companies had plunged into crisis and was sold off cheaply. The CEO was interviewed on TV about the industry. Not once — not once — did the big-name interviewer ask him about the way he had dumped his own stock.

There’s a reason the interviewer didn’t ask that question. It wasn’t her job. She wasn’t paid to break news. She was paid to get what the TV crowd calls “the big ‘get.’” In other words, she was paid to get access. Her job depends on getting the honchos to come on her show. And to get them to come on her show, she had to promise them — implicitly — an easy ride.

The move to Star Interviews and Infotainment to help fill the Media Economic Gap has been growing ever more quickly. So now one can almost ignore the Sunday News Analysis programs and Financial Press Interviews [TV, Web and print] because the kid gloves are fully on. Most of the responses are now carefully choreographed “party lines” with no attempt to ask any  tough questions – so you get a Talking Head well versed in skating around and beyond the facts or throw in a reference to bitter partisan takes on the political scene rather than any attempt to answer  questions posed.

4)Consensus Reporting - Brett argues that those that succeed in the news today are mimers – median roaders, consensus oriented, and not inclined to rock the boat.  Hence, controversy and uncomfortable truths  are avoided in a remarkable portion of news coverage. For, example,  none of the major TV and news outlets covered the following story about the Heritage Foundation:

It is ironic that one has to go to the Comedy News channels to get the really stunning newsworthy stories. The laugh is on the mainstream news media.

5)Fits a narrative – This is the storyline approach to self deception. Dan Ariely covers this  in his book the The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty in which he describe the social storylines that are constructed to maintain a sense of moral equilibrium in the face of dishonest behavior. As it turns out creative people are distinctly better at creating these exonerating narratives. And with the news business being  ever more infotainment oriented,  the media loves a great narrative.

This list seems pretty complete; however Brett misses three additional news media failures. Here are journalistic failure points 6, 7, and 8..

Dual Standards

There are three cases in which the news media have not just wavered but have  adopted dual standards in their reporting of the news.
6)Self Policing – the news media is rising to a fever pitch over the Justice Department’s wire tapping of  the Associated Press’ phones trying to find who leaked info on a Yemen terrorist strike – see here for counter reaction of Fortune magazine. One could wish that same fervour was aimed at self policing by the news media. The following story in theAtlantic is lonely and too few in which a clear case of unauthorized manipulation is done and a key party protests in print .  But this objection  is one of the few and far between. For example,  very few of the news media take on Fox News for it blatant skirting of elementary journalistic standards - not even bothering to hide journalistic travesties under the guise that these are opinion pieces and apologies were issued later to “restore” the full irony of Fox News “Fair and Balanced” coverage. This tolerance of blatantly poor journalism results in ever lower trust in all news  media.

7)”The Other Side Does it” Fallback – news media too often are taking the easy out that “both sides do it” when questionable practices or tactics are employed by opposing groups. Thus, in describing the role of PACs and SuperPACs which bring hundreds of millions of dollars to lobbying and  campaign funding, discussions about it inevitably founder on all  sides use it – as in the unions, business, various action committees, and both political parties.  Right. No attempt to look into  which groups use it most  or how and where. And it is not hard to find out - go here for a wealth of info.  This is classic hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil syndrome in the news media of late.

Another example is the deficit. President Obama is branded as the big deficit increaser. But this ignores the fact that Obama would not have spent so much money to rescue the economy if  8 years of Bush administration policies had not created the bubble and then tripped off the 2007-2009 Great recession. But even, worse only the NYTimes has run the facts on how President Reagan created the great GOP swing to Deficit Spending and that Republican Presidents in the past 30 years are responsible for over 70% of the huge deficit increase. And now, as new-found champions of reducing the deficit, the GOP use  Austerity Measures and complete obstruction of Obama Economic policies on Infrastructure Spending which  have added even more to the deficit because people earning infrastructure salaries draw less on welfare and increase tax revenues for the government reducing the deficit. But because “both parties are responsible for the deficit and recession”, the news media just do not cover the issue. This lead to the last news failure.

8)News Topic Taboos – nowhere are dual standards more prevalent than on major, critical issues facing the US. Consider a hypothetical list of  the 5 major problems confronting the US :
I)Voting irregularities  intense gerrymandering of electoral districts, increased restrictions on the right to vote, two recent presidential elections in question, campaign financing ballooning out of control, corporations and institutions declared equivalent to individuals in spending on  free speech despite the fact that those free speech expenditures may not reflect at all the beliefs and wishes of the corporate/institutions employees and broader stakeholders,  etc.
II)Income inequality has grown precipitously out of kilter – allowing Voting Irregularities and self-serving policies to be financed by a very few.

III)Healthcare costs in the US are the highest in the world per capita yet overall US Health services are ranked 37th in the world. The rise in healthcare costs is the  major contributor to US deficits.
IV)Rule of Law in the US is threatened by the fact that no financial executives have gone to jail over the Wall Street Scandals of 2006-2012 except for slam dunk Ponzi scheme cases. Now “Too-Big-To-Jail” is wrenching away  US Rule of Law.
V)More than 60% of Americans believe Global Warming exists and is responsible for dramatic climate changes. But like all the creeping resource [water, oil, suatainable arable land] shortages that come with an expanding World Population, Global Warming gets deferred and delayed as the US government has become paralyzed and unable to take concerted action. In fact, various special interests have been able  through lobbying and well oiled campaigns of deception to obstruct any meaningful work on global warming or other impending resource shortages and environmental concerns. Its as if an Easter Island-like Civilization-wide Collapse is a real world fate.

Yet every one of these topics is taboo – and gets at most kid glove treatment across most major news media. See, for example the coverage of Deficits and Income Inequality as tracked for monthly periods this year  where the items would be expected to be major topics in the broadcast news media:

Broadcast media coverage as Austerity measures and Sequester is Debated in Congress

Now consider how jobs and income inequality gets treated:

Again, the broadcast news channels cover the issue but only in a limited or “fair & balanced” fashion

Likewise the issue of global warming has been deserted by many media as their coverage wavers or subject to unbalanced coverage of the issue.  But perhaps the most disconcerting finding is the effect that “Too Big To Jail” has had on the Rule of Law. This Google search show how few of the major broadcast, print and web media have covered the issue. It is not a shame; but rather shameful.

Summary

Brett Arends makes the case that the US news media are lowering their standards. No doubt there is an economic component to that as print, broadcast and web media all are under very tight financial burdens. But as Brett Arends notes, news media are becoming lax. And perhaps the most pernicious case has been the news media’s acceptance of dual standards. One set for reporting on daily, non-encumbered or infotainment stories and another on events that have broad critical import and may negatively impact the news media’s own key  shareholders and “interested” parties.  More of the latter stories simply do not get reported. And as the Fifth Estate falters, so does the US economic, political and social vitality.

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Prof. Dan Ariely

I have been taking Coursera’s  Irrational Behaviour taught by Duke Professor Dan Ariely. The course concentrates on individual decision making and how decision methods depart from traditional rational  and economic utility models. There are compelling experimental and neuroscience proofs that a)individuals use different model or methods of decision making depending on circumstances[ the Kahneman and Tversky fast versus slow methods] and b)many, often non-intuitive factors such as loss aversion, effort ownership, and complexity avoidance among others profoundly shape our decisions in sharp departure from the expected rational models.

The course has been self instructive. 

For example, one of the topics of discussion that has arisen in the many forums, hangouts+meetings and group discussions provided in the course has been the question of the relative performance of group decision making [or problem solving] versus individual efforts – which performs best [and how to define and measure "best" ]. The question has arisen and been discussed in several hangouts. Here is what has been discovered:
1)Groups do  outperform the best individuals in problem solving tasks;
2)Measuring Group Decision Making effectiveness depends on a number of criteria;
3)Group Decision Making  is an even larger topic for its follies [...uhh departures from rational expectations]  than individual decision making.
And this is only the start of a topic of great interest that was sparked in the group discussions of Individual Irrational Behaviour. Thus, the course provided its own “proof” of the effectiveness of group discussion and  decision making.

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Image from Streetlog

For the past five years, the GOP has been able to marshall block votes against most  Democratic critical legislation in Congress. Given the continued exploitation of the filibuster rule in the Senate where a 60-40 vote is required to pass any legislation that Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell cares to oppose. Because the GOP has 46 Senators and leader McConnell can rely on them to almost always vote in a block, McConnell can effectively block any legislation he so chooses. Thus, Senator McConnell has tripled the number of bills that require cloture voting. The net result is that Congress in general has become do nothing because that was what  was decided back in 2009 at the time of President Obama’s  inauguration to be the best way to defeat the President –  a total scorched earth policy of obstructionism and sabotage of appointments, legislation, and executive orders. This has  has now become the GOP operating norm to this day.

Obstructionism Creates Internal GOP Tensions

5 years later Obstructionism and trying to brand President Obama as Socialist Radical is still the Republican strategy. However, there are inherent tensions and contradictions  in the Republican Base. The Republican Business Elites are sabotaging the GOP Base by bankrolling major GOP federal and state campaigns which  have targeted  both working class wages and benefits  plus safety net services that an increasing percentage of the low and middle class GOP Base have come to rely upon. And that middle class base has its own tensions with the right to lifers who in turn are not always sympathetic towards the  gun advocates. Or the immigration radicals who rebel against the need to get Hispanic votes orask  why  businesses get excused from prosecution for their employment of illegal immigrants. And  this defiance of the Rule of Law is redoubled in the case  of Wall Street financial executives who get huge public bailouts as Too Big To Fail “corporate welfare”  recipients but are given criminal prosecution dispensations [ "Too Big To Jail" ]no matter what financial crime they commit. Foreclosure fraud, money laundering, fraudulent interest rate setting, inside information trading you name it and financial executives are excused from criminal prosecution to the chagrin of GOP Base members who have fallen victim to these excesses.

Thus the GOP Base is not always enamored of Republican Obstructionism. For example, rejection of  Infrastructure programs cutting job opportunities  rankles the GOP middle class base who themselves or their family could use the jobs help. Or  falling way short of promises to clean up foreclosure misdeeds and the gross misconduct of banks in money laundering  and foreclosure malpractices. And now that gay marriage and immigration reform are becoming accepted Republican policy for the sake of the youth  and Hispanic votes, the divisions in the GOP  Base have  become more concentrated areas of attention.

Recent Cracks in the GOP Base

Four times within the last two weeks the base  Conservative ideology has been seriously challenged from within:
1)The GOP Gun vote in the Senate has proven very unpopular back home, even in Red states. So some in the GOP are now looking for ways to “back off with honor”. The problem is that Women voters are mad. See how badly Republican female Senators have done since the vote – triple the downturn of their male counterparts. And the GOP has   a big gap in women’s voting almost as bad as Latino and Asian votes.
2)Immigration Reform may well get defeated by the Tea Party dominated House. But then the petty Obstructionism which has been the GOP calling card for the last 5 years will be exposed again for viral sabotage – and some key GOP players like small and corporate businesses who are committed to immigration reform may call out their own GOP obstructionist.
3)A more formidable crack has come with discrediting of the Austerity paper by Harvard Economists Reinhart and Rogoff.  Suddenly the scaffolding for Deficit cutting buckles. See it  in the swift Air Controllers spending rescued from the Sequester cuts. In this light  torpedoing of Infrastructure Spending and continued Treading Water on Jobs  Initiatives becomes imminently less defensible given corporations reluctance to invest their huge multi $ trillions cash hoards in the US.
4)Perhaps under the radar has been  the wide array of  global examples that the US could do a lot better on gun reform, education, health care costs vs results,  and other key global issues. With the emergence of fierce  global competition in Economics – Brazil, China, India and other traditionally under-developed countries are leading World Economic growth at three times the US rate. Plus there is the stark reality of  fierce military asymmetrical vulnerability produced by terrorists willing to commit suicide as evidenced at 9/11 and the Boston Marathon. As a result the US electorate is becoming aware that its privileged World Leadership status is coming under wide competitive pressure. Thus, a Do-Nothing-Congress is an ill-affordable luxury.

Summary

In sum, the GOP may have themselves Hung and Quartered in the electorates eyes as the vast blind and petty fury of their Congressional Obstruction and Sabotage wreaks havoc on the GOP Base as well as the broad Middle Class. But the GOP Base itself is cracking along class and wealth lines as the GOP Base Elites have prospered for over 30 years at the ever higher expense of the GOP  Middle Class. What will bring about a Humpty Dumpty rift such that the GOP will not be able to  put the pieces back together again? Several scenarios are possible in the immediate term; but most likely, the Republican Presidential nomination process for 2016 will complete the fissure that was started in 2012. 

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The GOP has been attacking President Obama for all the Wrong Reasons: Benghazi Libyan embassy fight when the GOP had previously cut the State Departments defense funding. Or No New Taxes when there is general consensus that  tax revenues have dried up and tax reform is way overdue. Or the constant return to Obama’s birth certificate. Yet for the past four years, the  Obama administration has been handing an abysmal record on regulating and prosecuting Financial Institutions to the GOP on a tarnished platter for easy political pickings and exploitation. Just take a look.

The NYTimes has  described how the Obama Administration has caved yet again to the Banks . This time its on on illegal Foreclosures.  Here is the first part of the cave-in:

Federal banking regulators are trumpeting an $8.5 billion settlement this week with 10 banks as quick justice for aggrieved homeowners, but the deal is actually a way to quietly paper over a deeply flawed review of foreclosed loans ….To avoid criticism as the review stalled and consultants collected more than $1 billion in fees, the regulators, led by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, abandoned the effort after examining a sliver of nearly four million loans in foreclosure, the regulators and consultants said.

Because they have no idea how many borrowers were harmed, the regulators are spreading the cash payments over all 3.8 million borrowers — whether there was evidence of harm or not. As a result, many victims of foreclosure abuses like bungled loan modifications, deficient paperwork, excessive fees and wrongful evictions will most likely get less money[than deserved]….It’s absurd that this money will be distributed with such little regard to who was actually harmed,”

In a second editorial the NYTimes describes the Foreclosure deal as a “Wrist Slap”:

In the face of widespread evidence of illegal foreclosure practices, federal regulators in 2011 told the big banks to investigate themselves.  The banks had to hire consultants to review foreclosures in 2009 and 2010. If violations were found, they were supposed to reimburse wronged borrowers “as appropriate.” Regulators pledged to ensure that the reviews would be comprehensive and reliable. In practice, it was left up to banks to decide what constituted wrongful foreclosure and appropriate redress.

Not surprisingly, after spending an estimated $1.5 billion on consultants, the banks have found little wrongdoing and provided no meaningful relief. Equally unsurprising, regulators will let the banks off with a wrist slap for their failure to execute credible and effective reviews.

This week, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reached a deal with 10 banks under which the regulators will end the reviews and the banks will instead provide $8.5 billion in aid to borrowers.

Even more disconcerting is this lets the banks legally and financially off the hook for all of their Foreclosure Misdeeds. All were done under the Obama administration and a most pliant Attorney General Eric Holder and equally compliant Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

And these twoothless fairies have handed yet another financial  regulation debacle to the GOP if they care to take up  the failure to prosecute HSBC bank officials for a decade of money laundering. But the GOP is stuck on NO. No way they want to touch the issue of financial institution’s improprieties.  Again, the instrument of choice by the Obama administration is the wrist-slap of a record $1.9B fine. But this fines  is  just the tiniest wrist slap because the $1.9B amount is made up in less than 2 months of  HSBC’s record $13.7B in annual profits.

Now these two recent cases  would appear to be just the ammunition Republicans need to a)prove that regulations under Obama are not working and b)they could defend the Middle Class more effectively than Obama and the Democrats. And indeed two days before the $8.5B in fines, the House under GOP control did ask for a delay in approving the agreement on foreclosures. But this turned out to be nothing as the deal went ahead. So the GOP appears to have  given up any effort  against the Big Banks on behalf of the 3.8million Americans affected by unfair bank foreclosures. But  this a Foreclosure Deal that Salon and Bloomberg also found badly tainted. It is remarkable that such a bad  deal could not entice Republicans in the House into action. And as for the HSBC lack of prosecutions, there is no Republican  concerted opposition. So the professed needs to “get the housing market moving again” carried the day despite earlier promises to clean up the foreclosures mess “cleanly and fairly”.

This has a perverse echo in the recent HSBC Money Laundering Deal where the HSBC was declared to be “Too big to proescute” by Obama’s Attoney Generals office [and provoked this eloquent tirade by Mark Taibbi in Rolling Stone.]. But the details of the HSBC case provoked a great deal  of consternation from Reuters , Jon Stewart’s the Daily Show,   Blacklisted, Huffington Post, and CBS News. Political opportunity knocks for the GOP. The Republican reaction – Nada!

If you look at the record for 2012, one sees no letup in criminal activity by the banks. Many have suggested that the fact that there have been NO criminal prosecutions and no time served by any of the major bankers has removed a critical deterence- jailtime for executive.  the only record of prosecutions in the past 4 years have been Ponzi scheme where the collapse of the Ponzi schemes presented the government with  irrefutable evidence. yet the litany of malfeasance as we shall see below is long and disturbing.

Recent  Banks Scandals and Criminal Activity

Deep in the recesses of Goldman Sachs there is undoubtedly a Financial Scandal Scorecard which keeps track of the risk and rewards associated with Banks criminal activities. That scorecard  would look like this:

2012 – Financial Scandals

Now lets be clear again – these are some of  the major malfeasance of the Financial Community since the 2007-2008 Financial Recession. After promises since 2009 in Congress, in TV commercials to the American public, and in a cross section of media reports, the Banks have shown a degree of financial  criminal recidivism that would get you busted for a 30 year jail term in the criminal courts. And that is the problem. The federal financial regulators[everyone of the 17 federal agencies watching for financial malfeasance - could that be a problem?] have avoided and cutoff almost all criminal court prosecutions in favor of civil court cases. So the Rule of Law is mocked by “these largest fines in history” because a)the financial institutions will earn in 1 quarter or less enough to pay the fines, b)no criminal prosecution of finacial executives are pursued and c)the “admission of no guilt” as part of the settlement acts as a wall against others trying to secure redress in either civil or criminal cases. So no wonder the same financial criminal behaviour continues – the government has left the criminal element free to do as it pleases on the Street.

Summary

Since President Obama took office he has been dealing with an International Financial Community mostly based  in Big US Banks that almost brought the World Economy to its knees. Those financial executives have been excused from any criminal  prosecutions for wrong doing during the Mortgage Crisis and now for  Money Laundering and Foreclosure Misdeeds.  All of these crimes were callous and costly. How do you explain that? Even more vexing, how do you explain that the GOP, looking for a means of tarring and feathering the President in the recent presidential campaign, did not seize upon these miscarriages of justice? This kid glove treatment of the Financial Community has shaken the Rule of Law at its foundation – everybody must answer to the law from the lowest to the highest elites with the same and fair due process. Answer these questions of Democratic and Republican group decision making gone awry and you will have the tenor of the Times.

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Only in the USA could a majority vote for Gun Reform be turned upside  down in the US Senate. This is on Universal Gun Buyer Background checks which currently have majority popular support reaching as high as  91% of the US electorate in over a half dozen polls. No matter how you ask the question, a majority of the Public supports background checks. But because it was a cloture vote in the Senate, the majority of Senators in favor of universal background checks were thwarted because a 60-to 40 vote or better is required on the once rarely used Senate Cloture vote.  But Cloture or Filibuster votes are are now regularly employed by the GOP to obstruct and thwart legislation which would otherwise pass in the Senate.

GOP+NRA Argument Against Gun Reform- “It Wont be Effective”

Note this great video from the Daily Show is available only in the US

John Oliver does a  superb send-up on the Daily Show, Gun Control Whoop-Dee-Do. This video shows in hilarious fashion how effective comprehensive Gun Reform has been in Australia[unfortunately Comedy Central only allows its video to be viewed in the US]. Until Gun Reform in Australia in 1996 there had been mass shootings of 4 or more persons 11 times in the previous the ten years . Since the 1996 legislation there have been none. The NRA and the Republican party have been trying to suppress such clear evidence on the effectiveness of Gun Reform. Slate Magazine has a superb report on the effectiveness of the Australian Gun Reform and the GOP+NRA campaign to discredit the Australian results:

On April 28, 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By the time he was finished, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. It was the worst mass murder in Australia’s history.

Twelve days later, Australia’s government did something remarkable. Led by newly elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it announced a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact sweeping gun-control measures. A decade and a half hence, the results of these policy changes are clear: They worked really, really well.

At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here’s the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn’t been a single one in Australia since.

So when President Obama and Arizona mass murder casualty Pat Maisich said “shame on you” to the 40 GOP and 4 Democratic Senators for their cowardice and caving to the NRA, they clearly had the moral high ground. So the US will likely suffer another 31,000 gun related deaths in 2013 – also likely in the pattern of 2010: 1000 accidental, 11,000 homicides, 19,000 suicides. In Australia the total is 236 total gun related deaths in 2010 up from 227 in 2009. In Britain the total of gun related deaths is 155 for 2010 despite having a population that is nearly double Australia’s. So the US which has spent trillions of dollars on anti-terrorist activities for approximately 7000 total US deaths is willing to do nothing more on gun related deaths. This means Guns will rank just below Breast Cancer for cause of annual deaths in the US. Gun Run anyone?

Democracy Thwarted

Ye Editor is taking the Coursera  Democratic Development by Stanford University Professor Diamond. In the course Professor Diamond examines some of the key measures of democracy. The US  is ranked 27th among the over 160 countries rated Democratic. The US slips notably in 4 areas:
Rule of Law – versus the Too Big To Jail of Wall Street bankers and financial executives
Voting Rights and Election Validity  – versus US recent GOP restrictions on voting qualifications despite virtually no cases of election fraud plus the Presidential election controversies in 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio.
Freedoms Preservation – Supreme Court Jan 2010 decision making Corporations equivalent to individuals in Freedom od Speech rights where clearly  they are not the equivalent of individuals. First, most corporations reflect only the views of the top executives and board not at all the totality of views represented by the corporations employees, supplier, shareholders and other stakeholders. As well most corporations can marshall much more cash and other influences than most inividuals.
Fair Representation – the Senate cloture rule sees ever more frequent usage. There were 180  in 2011 – and threats of cloture even more frequent. This then defeats measures where a  natural majority  vote would ordinarily prevail.

Of the attacks on US Democracy, the cloture rule seems the most perfidious because as we have seen on the Gun reform vote – the clear evidence of Gun reform’s effectiveness can be ignored as well as the will of the Public as reflected in several dozen polls. It reminds one of the Pogo line – “We have met the enemy and they is US”.

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Three weeks ago this blog presented Moores Law is Alive and Well.  But reader reaction was mixed because the post emphasized growth in  computing power rather than number of transistors per chip. But really Moores Law has two meanings in electronics. The strict original circuit design  definition was that the number of transistors on a 2D integrated circuit chip would double in number for the same cost about every 18-24 months.How and what was done with those transistors has been unstated but the assumption has been that the resulting computing processing will take advantage of those additional transistors. As well, Moores Law is merely a statistical  observation of trends in electronics. It is not a law of physics or electronics.

However, Moores Law has a second, broader meaning or interpretation – that computing power on a variety of electronic devices will double every 18-24 months based on what is done with those transistors. Computing power can be measured in various language benchmarks and program performance tests. But generally broad computing power has stayed in lock step with on-chip transistor doubling. AI researcher Ray Kurzweill has championed this broader interpretation and has charted its performance over a 100 year period:

Ray Kurzweil’s plotting of Calculations/second over 20th century

So in the popular mind, Moores Law is about effective computer power as much as numbers of transistors per standard chip area. Thus it is of interest that there have been two recent and telling cautions on Moore’s Law.

Two New Warnings About Moores Law’s Continuation

There have been two notable  cautions from experts in electronics where they have run up against physical limits that appear to mean the demise of Moores Law in their  products. The first, is SanDisk, the makers of flash chips for cameras, mobile devices, and PCs. SanDisk flash chips have an enviable and better than Moores Law record.  14 times in the last 19 years they have doubled in capacity for the same price-the current 64GB chip sells for roughly the same price as the original 500MB. The NYTimes described the  barriers that SanDisk was encountering:

“When we started out we had about one million electrons per cell,” or locations where information is stored on a chip, he said. “We are now down to a few hundred.” This simply can’t go on forever, he noted: “We can’t get below one.” SanDisk and other flash memory makers have figured out how to cram even more information into that tiny cell. Until a few years ago, each of those cells worked the way most computer memory does — it represented either a zero or a one. Now the chip can actually count how many electrons are in a cell, and depending on the number it can write and read up to 16 states (recording a number between zero and 15, or four bits to a computer).

Let’s stop for a second to take stock of the wonder of all this. The last flash memory card I bought for my camera held two gigabytes (16 billion bits). It cost me $6. And somewhere inside it is something that is counting electrons 40 at a time. An electron, in case you forgot your high-school physics, has a radius of 2.8179 × 10-15 meters. In layman’s terms it is pretty much the smallest thing you could ever count. The problem here is that the way current flash technology stores those electrons, they don’t always follow instructions, especially as the memory card gets older. “When you have a billion cells, you cannot uniformly control them to one electron,” Mr. Harari said. “If I want 40 electrons, plus or minus two electrons, I can do that when the device is new. But seven years out, it will start to smear.” In other words, the electron count will start to vary from one cell to the next.

So SanDisk engineers  incorporated a number of methods to continue to improve their chip performance. They had already gone with multi-state half-byte cells in the style of memresistors considered by CPU chip developers. They  started to work more concertedly on layered 3D-designs having bought Matrix Semiconductors for this purpose. Read-only designs of 4 and 8 layers have been successfully tested but not read-write. The engineers are also working on more precise controllers on the cells plus methods to stuff more  electrons into cells. But SanDisk CEO Eli Harari saw 2-3 more generations of doubling and then SanDisk would be hard pressed to continue with Moores Law improvements. More than 3 years later and SanDisk introduced 64GB flash memory which doubled its previous maximum size thus  providing evidence of  the slowdown in Moores Law improvements.

AMD Sees Moores Law Foundering on Economic Barriers

AMD  has recently hit the 28nm to 20nm economic barrier. The process investment for fab facilities and improved equipment, processes and yields are so high, it does not economic sense to push the Moore law doubling of transistors without getting sufficient returns for the capital investments. John Gustafson, chief graphics product architect at AMD, has said that Moore’s Law is endangered because for many chip manufacturers because it actually refers to a doubling of transistors that are economically viable to produce doe not make economic sense.

So the current problem is that as investment in fabricating equipment to produce the  30 to 10 nanometer line sizes on ever larger silicon dies increase  exponentially in costs. Thus  the time for economy recovery of those costs goes out well beyond 18-24 months when doubling is to occur. In short, AMD is arguing that the economics of current chip development demands a product recovery cycle longer than the Moores Law period. However, Intel the leader in chip production makes so many chips that they are able to amortize their latest 20 and 14 nanometer chip lines in less than 2 year periods. So Intel is still charging down the shrinking chip size route. An  IEEE reports spells out some of these costs:

These threats are in the form of a convergence of three waves which requires major necessary changes relating to: a) lithography below 0.13 nanometers which involves printing and aligning at submicron wavelength dimensions with new unproven lasers/lens systems; b) Cu/low-? interconnect technology, which is facing major challenges in achieving commercially viable yields; and c) 300 mm wafer size conversion, which requires an extensive retooling of the entire industry.

This is not an unanticipated trend and led to Moores Second Law proposed by Venture Capitalist Arthur Rock :

As the cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore’s law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for the sustaining of Moore’s Law. This had led to the formulation of “Moore’s second law”, aka Rock’s law, which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fab also increases exponentially over time.

In sum the argument here is that the cost of manufacturing, not physical limits and barriers, will be instrumental in slowing up Moores Law progression in usable and resultant computing power.

A Small History of Moores Law Ebb and Flow

But Moores Law has encountered impossible barriers in the past. Several time in the past 40 years Moores Law has appeared to come up against physical limits in the cell designs and cost and reliable chip processing barriers. The first important barrier was the power requirements associated with fast TTL and NMOS circuits of the 1970′s along with increasing difficulties in etching ever smaller circuit layouts. CMOS circuits became the breakthrough as described in Wikipedia:

CMOS circuitry dissipates less power than logic families with resistive loads. Since this advantage has increased and grown more important, CMOS processes and variants have come to dominate, thus the vast majority of modern integrated circuit manufacturing is on CMOS processes. As of 2010, CPUs with the best performance per watt each year have been CMOS static logic since 1976.

The next limit encountered was the inability of mercury based photo-lithography of the early 1980′s to etch circuit patterns below 1000 nanometers and at the rates required for effective economies of production. But IBM’s development of the excimer laser technology in 1982 has allowed etching down to the 10 nanometer levels with dozens of layering steps. The result is that “excimer laser lithography has been a crucial factor in the continued advance of Moore’s Law, enabling minimum features sizes in chip manufacturing to shrink from 0.5 micrometer in 1990 to 45 nanometers and below in 2010. This trend is expected to continue into this decade for even denser chips, with minimum features approaching 10 nanometers”.

The third recent limit has been the GHz barrier in chips. Here again power consumption needed to achieve ever higher clock cycles with reliable accuracy became an effective barrier to just increasing the cycle time. So instead of increasing clock speed, chip makers added more cpus or cores on a chip. First dual core, then quad core and now octo cores and greater. This requires more sophisticated operating system process control as welll as parallel processing/threading methods in programming languages.So for the first time, software improvements have bene as important as hardware and chip improvements.

And new techniques such as 3D layered circuits, more sophisticated cell interconnects, andspecialized coatings have extended Moore Law performance for 3-8 years varying with industry spokeperson. But the Department of Defense is so concerned that Moores law will not be sustained for the next 10-15 years and thus endanger their Big Data based analysis and embedded critical control+response systems that they have already invested multi-millions in basic Moores Law Preserving/Extending research. The program is called PERFECT – Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technology and as seen below it has started to effect basic approaches to chip design and production.

Some current Approaches to Moores Law Extension

Like Mark Twain’s quip that reports of his death were premature – so have been the nay-saying about Moores Law over the past 10-15 years.

The DARPA interest in prolonging Moores Law performance has broad electronics industry support. Here are some promising technologies and a rough assessment of their tradeoffs in preserving Moores Law-like improvements in computing power.

Graphene - IBM and Georgia Tech are pursuing the use of graphene in ultrathin layers. The advantage of graphene  in its “chicken-wire”  thin-layer lattice is that they can  conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, very little heat generation – and less power consumption than silicon. However, just as in the HP molecular level methods cited below, the trick is to be able to layout circuits effectively at nanometer sizes. The Georgia Tech research has developed silicon carbide deposition techniques with graphene coatings using methods from silicon chip-making. The nanometer processing still has nearby limits but the graphene layers provide the performance improvement opportunities.

IBM Low Power change of state - The advantage of IBM’s recent development in metal oxides change of state technology is that continuous power is not required but rather microbursts of electricity make change of state and reads of state require less energy. But the experimental technology just to create/print circuits is 2-4 years away and still not scaled to meet massive circuit layouts.

HP and molecular level cells - had a big splash in 2003-2004 with possibility of molecular chip designs. But the problems of applying layouts on substrates at the 1-5 nanometer size have been  proving difficult. However, some of the processing technology has been instrumental in memresistor breakthroughs just below.

HP memresistors - SanDisks flash memory limits cited above  may have a solution with the use of memresistors although SanDisk has already gone to half-byte memory cells.  HP’s memresistor technology has the advantage of non-volatile and therefore lower power requirements along with potentially great capacity. But the change to a new processing technology has seen engineering delays.

Wikipedia – cites three promising chip design technologies:

In February 2010, Researchers at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland announced a breakthrough in transistors with the design and fabrication of the world’s first junctionless transistor. The research led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge was published in Nature Nanotechnology and describes a control gate around a silicon nanowire that can tighten around the wire to the point of closing down the passage of electrons without the use of junctions or doping. The researchers claim that the new junctionless transistors can be produced at 10-nanometer scale using existing fabrication techniques.
In April 2011, a research team at the University of Pittsburgh announced the development of a single-electron transistor 1.5 nanometers in diameter made out of oxide based materials. According to the researchers, three “wires” converge on a central “island” which can house one or two electrons. Electrons tunnel from one wire to another through the island. Conditions on the third wire results in distinct conductive properties including the ability of the transistor to act as a solid state memory.
In February 2012, a research team at the University of New South Wales announced the development of the first working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal (not just picked from a large sample of random transistors).Moore’s Law expected for this milestone to be reached, in lab, by 2020.

Clearly these methods will require major shifts in design and production. Thus, they are even further away from fruition than the previously discussed process improvements. But clearly both industry and University Research groups are busy working on the next generation of computing technology with Moores Law performance clearly in mind.

However, all of these technologies underline the difficulty of moving away from silicon to molecular chips or  graphene where  many of the underlying manufacturing processes will have to change at very high entry costs. Thus the risk if it does not deliver expected performance and reliability is even greater. Yet despite the obstacles, the electronics industry’s past  success with the addition  of  DARPA funding has spurred a great deal of interest in finding how to preserve Moores Law in the electronics sector.

Summary

The consensus is that Moores Law may be reaching an inflection point. Traditional silicon based processes with their dependence on  super-light spectrum lithography may require a transition to non-traditional technologies to continue the 2 year doubling in transisitors and resultant computing power.  A range of stop gap methods may carry Moores law improvements  for the next 2-5 years, but there may  be  a distinct slowdown if the industry is  not already in one[basic CPU speed has not come close to doubling in the past 3-4 years. Overall silicon enabled features have grown with a proliferation of sensors, storage capacity, and communication capabilities].

Hence  a period of reculer pour sauter mieux - step back to better leap forward may be taking place right now. Thus the electronics industry is shifting its focus from hardware to software to take advantage of dozens of GPU chips, core processors, on-chip memory caches, and heterogeneous  processors. Threads and parallel processing technologies are already being used. So the industry has already produced a wide range of improved  results that have  mitigated any actual slowdown in transistors produced per chip. Thus today’s improvements are derived more from  better performance from the existing computing elements on the chip.

Finally here is a cautionary advisory on why Moores-Law-like exponential improvements in performance cannot be applied to other technologies like batteries, solar cells, or bio-processes. The movement of electrons in semi-crystalline substrates like silicon operates at a microscopic scale and simplified environ not easily duplicated by chemical  battery ions or biochemical systems. So the next few years will be interesting for  electronics. The question will be how well and fast can the inevitable transition from silicon to other “chip” technologies take place? Will the industry be able to extract  more performance from smaller increases in transistor counts.  And as the industry moves to improve its performance with more advanced interfaces and software based methods – will this allow for out-of–the-silicon-box improvements in chip technology  to emerge and restore Moores Law as a driver of innovation in the industry?

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