Did Obama's State of the Union abandon his focus on income inequality?

I didn't watch President Obama's speech last night, so I have no comments of my own. But I recommend reading what Mickey Kaus, Matthew Yglesias, and Andrew Sullivan have to say about it.

Here's one of Kaus's points:

In his allegedly table-setting, voice-finding December Kansas manifesto, Obama made a big deal about rising money inequality, citing statistics on the relative growth of the ”average income of the top 1%,” referencing the Occupy movement, etc. There was none of that in Tuesday’s speech. Obama only wants “an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” He didn’t say everyone “gets their fair share.” That’s not money-equalizing populism[.] It’s moderate Republicanism. Looks like Walter Russell Mead was right – [the Kansas speech] was just a ploy to stroke Obama’s left base, quickly abandoned when more Americans were paying attention. Or else it polled as badly as he suspected it would. Sorry, E.J. … (Don’t tell me about the Buffet Rule: Obama pitched his higher top tax rate for “millionaires” as a way to ensure equal sacrifice (as anticipated by W. Galston) not as a way to help reverse the growing income inequality trend.)

Yglesias writes:

Obama pledged to support “every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs,” perhaps making him the only person in America who didn’t read the New York Times story over the weekend about how Apple’s products are all built in Asia.

The right lesson to take from Apple might be that an economic agenda whose “blueprint begins with American manufacturing” is misguided. South Korea, Taiwan, and China all have us beat as builders of electronics. But the world’s leading mobile electronics maker is headquartered in the United States of America and it’s insanely popular. That’s because the greatest value in the electronics business is in the industrial design, the software engineering, the marketing, and the combination of research and intuition that help you figure out what products people will want. Manufacturing, as a statistical category, is more arbitrary than people realize. There’s no inherently greater virtue in putting tuna into a can . . . than in preparing a seared tuna appetizer . . . . If people aspire to remodel kitchens or teach yoga or treat illness or be hair stylists or be chefs or, God forbid, Internet columnists . . . there’s nothing wrong with that.

Why Americans shouldn't feel that bad about Apple outsourcing to China

In response to the New York Times article on Apple employing Chinese workers to manufacture iPhones and other products, The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn talked to some economists to get their reactions. One of them, Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, had this to say. That whole post is worth reading, but here's his conclusion:

The Times reporters persuaded me that east Asia in general, and China in particular, offer an abundance [of] hard-working people with decent skills willing to accept demanding, poorly paid, and boring jobs. The jobs are acceptable to millions of Chinese, including workers with good technical skills, because the other career alternatives open to them are no better, and possibly much worse, than those in manufacturing. The plain fact is that, for the great majority of 17-to-30 year-old Americans, there are better, or at least less risky, alternatives to a manufacturing career.

Steve Jobs has died at 56.

Steve Jobs died today due to pancreatic cancer, just over a month after he resigned as CEO of Apple.

The Apple.com homepage is now a tribute to Jobs.

The first sentence of the New York Times' obituary:

Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday.

In any obituary thread on Metafilter, people normally post a period to represent a moment of silence for someone who has died. Many commenters today are posting an Apple logo instead. (You'll only see them if you're using a Mac.)

Searching through the Metafilter thread shows that several different commenters have used the word "aesthetic." For example, this comment:

Thank you for all the pretty computers. Meaning, thank you for thinking about design and style and what the rest of us out here had to look at and touch every day. Apple has forced the rest of the industry to think just a little bit more about the aesthetic of the consumer experience, which I appreciate.

Many comments also use the word "beautiful":

Steve Jobs believed the revolutionary idea that the tools you use should be as beautiful as the work you produce with them.

The New York Times quotes a Twitter post:

RIP Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.

A few years ago I was having a conversation about computers with an acquaintance who seemed to know more about them than I did. I had made it clear that I was a lifelong Mac user (with one small exception). He tried to explain why he preferred PCs to Macs. He said something along the lines of: "All Apple does is give computer users exactly what they want." Amazingly, he meant that as a criticism of Macs — for being too user-friendly and appealing. My response: "Gee, if that's all Apple does, isn't that enough?"

As I mentioned, there was only one exception to my lifelong devotion to Macs. In my first semester of law school, I had to use a PC. In order to take an exam on your computer you had to use the specific exam-taking software provided by the school, and it wasn't Mac-compatible. (Handwritten exams are allowed, but that isn't a viable option since you don't get any extra time.) At the beginning of the next semester, my law school announced that the software had been updated to be Mac-compatible. I was so frustrated by my bad luck — I can't get a new computer when I just bought a computer 4 months ago that's working fine, can I? Of course, as a first-year law student, I wasn't earning any money. I apologetically asked my mom if she could pay for a new Macbook for me, saying "I know I just got a computer . . ." but starting to explain why I thought the Mac's improvement over the PC would be worth it. She cut me off, saying: "I know exactly what you mean. You don't even need to explain it." (I got the Mac and sold the PC to another student — which wasn't hard, since I had the perfect explanation of why I wanted to sell a perfectly good computer.)

If you're a Mac user, you might not be able to put into words why using a Mac is so important. You just know.

The New York Times quotes Jobs:

He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

The New York Times adds:

As the gravity of his illness became known, and particularly after he announced he was stepping down, he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.

A commenter in the Metafilter thread says:

I just told my wife, who is completely disconnected from the geek world where I live, that Steve Jobs was dead.

When I told her, she accidentally dropped her iPad 2 on the hard floor but it did not break. It didn't have a scratch on it.

I think that says something about this man who demanded and delivered excellence.

As I recently blogged and as many people are quoting today, Jobs had this to say about life and death in his commencement address to Stanford University in 2005:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

(Photo from this website via Google image search.)