Left Greets Apple Watch With Open Scorn
The Apple watch goes on sale Friday, and, just in time, the left is preparing a new assault on the worlds most-admired company.
The signal came in the New Yorker magazine, a publication that embodies elite left-wing political sensibilities and one that has also happily accepted its share of Apple advertising dollars over the years.
It came in a New Yorker article written by Jill Lepore, a professor at Harvard University, an institution that rivals the New Yorker as an elite left-wing flagship and that has also sold its share of Apple products over the years.
The key passage in the New Yorker article went like this: The iPhone exists, as Mariana Mazzucato demonstrated in her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State, because various branches of the U.S. government provided research assistance that resulted in several key technological developments, including GPS, multi-touch screens, LCD displays, lithium-ion batteries, and cellular networks.
What a breathtaking claim. By this analysis, Apples success isnt the result of Steve Jobs' brilliance or Apple executive Jonathan Ives design savvy or international trade. Its the product of the U.S. government.
I must confess that I find this claim troubling. Even if one concedes that various components and technologies in the iPhone and in the Apple watch had origins in the U.S. defense technology, this explanatory framework leaves a lot to be desired.
Why did Apple successfully commercialize the technology and not some other company or branch of the government? Why are Apple stores so much more pleasant to be in than, say, a post office or a veterans hospital waiting room. Why does the online Apple store work so much better than Healthcare.gov?
Searching for answers, I bought Professor Mazzucatos book. Disappointingly, there is a lot of nasty name-calling. One chapter title refers to rotten apples, as if the author were an ill-behaved youngster insulting someone as a rotten egg. Private businesses Apple included are repeatedly described as parasitic, an unwelcome contemporary twist on the age-old anti-Semitic libel of capitalists as blood-suckers.
Typically of the left at its worst, the book not only refuses to seriously engage with different views, it denies even the possibility that they can exist. It is indisputable that most of Apples best technologies exist because of the prior collective and cumulative efforts driven by the State, Professor Mazzucato writes. Got that? Indisputable, as in, impossible to dispute.
Professor Mazzucato, who teaches at the University of Sussex in England, declares on her website that her current research is funded by the Ford Foundation, by the European Commission, and by George Soros Institute for New Economic Thinking
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Ira-Stoll/Apple-Watch-New-Yorker-Jobs/2015/04/20/id/639628/#ixzz3Xx3CVOVF
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