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Articles by Rob Atkinson
Optimización de la documentación de los servicios de datos geoespaciales con los bloques de construcción del OGC
Ayuda Buscar en la ayuda Buscar en la ayuda Optimización de la documentación de los servicios de datos geoespaciales con los bloques de construcción del OGC Autores: Mayte Toscano Domínguez, Alejandro Villar Fernández, Rob Atkinson Localización: Mapping, ISSN 1131-9100, Nº 218, 2025, págs.
Standards for Data Space Building Blocks
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Standards for Data Spaces Building Blocks
Preprint Article Version 1 This version is not peer-reviewed Version 1 : Received: 26 July 2024 / Approved: 26 July 2024 / Online: 29 July 2024 (10:50:55 CEST) Noardo, F.; Atkinson, R.; Bastin, L.; Maso, J.; Simonis, I.; Villar, A.; Voidrot, M.-F.; Zaborowski, P. Standards for Data Spaces Building Blocks. Preprints 2024, 2024072264. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.2264.v1 Noardo, F.; Atkinson, R.; Bastin, L.; Maso, J.; Simonis, I.; Villar, A.; Voidrot, M.-F.; Zaborowski, P.
How telcos can help enterprises scale emerging technologies
Digital investments are on the rise – but to realize their full value, enterprises need to advance faster from trials to deployments. In brief Enterprises are spending more on emerging technologies year-on-year – but are struggling to expand pilot use cases into live production. When assessing potential providers, businesses are clear on the vendor capabilities they’re seeking, yet are still finding it hard to make choices.
Busting Roadblocks to Technology Policy
In a world constantly redefined and reshaped by technology, understanding the trajectory of digital transformation is crucial. The recently aired episode of the “Embracing Digital Transformation” podcast featuring a lengthy conversation with Rob Atkinson and Darren is an eye-opener on this very subject.
Demystifying carbon offsets vs direct reductions
DPR Construction headquarters in Austin, Texas. Photo courtesy IA Interior Architects Continue Reading Many companies are striving to achieve climate neutrality, which involves bringing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions down to net zero on an annual basis. But most cannot immediately reduce their emissions to that level and will need several years to invest in the required technology as well as change their energy use practices.
The Case for National Developmentalism
Neoliberalism, the economic policy doctrine of free trade, free markets, and limited government that has prevailed since the early 1980s, has run its course. Many policymakers across the political spectrum are now skeptical of unfettered globalization, decry large corporations, and lament the plight of workers. In an echo of the New Deal era, when President Franklin D.
The Emergence of Anti-Corporate Progressivism
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash Opposition to globalization. Efforts to weaken intellectual property protections. Pushing for municipal broadband. Calls for the National Institutes of Health to develop drugs. What do these positions have in common? They are all examples of the recent turn toward anti-corporate progressivism.
Harnessing the Private Sector for the Public Good
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash Markets do not naturally tend toward “equilibrium.” They are wrecking balls if not properly harnessed.
It’s Time to Bring Back Place-Based Policymaking
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Photo by Josh Berendes on Unsplash Between the New Deal era of the 1930s and the late 1970s, it was the formal policy of the federal government to care about and try to reduce regional economic disparities. But as neoclassical economics steeped with market fundamentalist ideology started to gain ascendency in the 1970s, the federal government gradually abandoned efforts to help lagging regions.
Is Sweden a Free-Market Welfare State?
Forget American exceptionalism. Tiny social democratic Sweden is the country that embodies humanity’s future in the eyes of much of the global liberal left. A generation ago, the liberal economist Robert Heilbroner famously described his utopia as “a slightly idealized Sweden.” Now, the Niskanen Center’s Samuel Hammond has tried to draft Sweden for the libertarian team.
Adopting an Industrial Policy Doesn’t Mean We’re Emulating China
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash As the Biden administration and Congress consider “industrial policy” legislation (e.g., the Endless Frontier Act, the CHIPS Act, funding for shoring up domestic supply chains, and a more robust R&D credit) it’s perhaps not surprising that many pundits, journalists, and policymakers are asking how this is any different than what China is doing.
The Fed’s Most Harmful Statistics Error
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Government economic statistics are critical to understanding the economy and making policy. For example, the Federal Reserve relies on accurate information about inflation to make monetary policy. Accurate statistics are also important for understanding structural economic changes and economic performance. Nowhere is this more important than in understanding what has happened to manufacturing output and business investment.
Freedom, Fairness or Flourishing: America’s Fundamental Economic Policy Choice
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Joe Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan is big and bold. Most pundits and the media see it as a rejection of the prior half century of small government, free-market conservative thinking and a new kind of growth policy. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, “It all marks a major turning point for economic policy. The gamble underlying the agenda is the belief that government can be a primary driver for growth.” But this is wrong.
Calling on the Wrong Profession: Time to Listen Less to Economists
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. As hard as it is to believe, there was a time – before the New Deal – when economists were largely treated like any other interest group, occasionally saying something interesting, but usually ignored by policymakers. All that changed when Keynesian economics started to be seen to the solution of business cycle downturns, and then after the War with rapid expansion of economics graduate school enrollments.
Why Raising the Minimum Wage Will Grow the Economy, Not Kill Jobs
Whenever Congress debates raising the minimum wage, policymakers reflexively turn to economists for advice, and nearly all economists, regardless of their ideological orientation, say with unyielding conviction that a higher minimum wage will produce higher unemployment. The only difference between conservative and liberal economists is that they latter say the increase will be negligible, but at least the remaining low-income workers will earn a bit more. But nearly all economists are wrong.
It’s Neither the Investor Class nor the Middle Class: It’s the Producer Class, Stupid!
If one believes that ideas matter, then the person who has surely done the most harm to humanity is Karl Marx, as his writings led to Communism, with its repression and tens of millions of deaths (as well the rise of Nazi Germany). But today in the United States, Marx’s most damaging legacy is his assertion that the economy is irrevocably divided into hostile classes: capitalist and proletariat, whose interests are hostile. In the Marxian conception, enterprises are synonymous with capitalists.
Should President Biden Revoke Section 230?
The beautiful dream of an open and free internet, serving as a global agora of unlimited free speech to provide for more democratic participation, has crashed and burned one more time. The mob attack on the US Capitol was incited and planned over Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other digital media platforms, with a tragic nudge from the president of the United States.
GameStop: Intentionally Dying
Our country, we tell ourselves, is a place where anyone can make it if they study enough, and where the smartest rise to the top. Grow up in a sad town with only empty lots where factories used to be? Hit the books, spend your days in the library memorizing dates, equations, and working out that brain. Get A pluses on those test to get a golden ticket straight to Princeton, or Yale, or if you only got A’s, Cornell or Duke.
Before COVID, the Economy Was Already Sick from Washington Groupthink
When it comes to the economy, the Biden administration will have to focus on three things: COVID, a recovery package, and China. Everyone understands we have to get vaccines in the arms of as many Americans as possible as soon as possible. And hopefully the Senate can agree on an economic recovery package.
National Developmentalism ≠ Critical Theory Radicalism
After years of dismissing the rise of critical theory-inspired identity politics, many conservatives have become “woke” to just how divisive this movement is. The problem, however, is that some free market fundamentalists see both radical intersectionalists and Hamiltonian supporters of national developmentalism as desecrators of the Founding Father’s principles.
Potato Chips, Computer Chips: Yes, There is a Difference
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. After a half century of neoclassical economics dominance, it has become a truism among most economists and policy makers that a nation’s sectoral composition doesn’t matter. Indeed, perhaps no canard has been more damaging to the process of putting in place a national innovation and competitiveness strategy than the notion that America can not only afford to be, but actually should be, indifferent to what industries comprise the U.S. economy.
Growth vs. Redistribution: the New Fault Line in U.S. Politics of Economic Policy
A few years ago, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF, the tech policy think tank I lead) surveyed several hundred DC policy folks to find out, among other things, what they thought ITIF’s political orientation was. About 40 percent said we were moderate, a third said we were conservative, and a quarter said we were liberal. Assuming the latter two groups weren’t clueless, it reinforced to me that on economic policy, the old conservative-liberal lines are anachronistic.
Progressive Hypocrisy and Our COVID Lockdown Opportunity
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Noam Galai/Getty Images As large swaths of the country prepare to re-enter COVID-19 lockdowns—my current city of Denver, for instance, banned all indoor dining just last week—it is worth pausing to again lament the ham-fisted, blunderbuss nature of most of these virus-fighting measures. As many presciently pointed out at an early stage of the outbreak, mass, society-wide lockdowns are, at best, ambiguous as to their efficaciousness.
Industrial Policy May Have Finally Arrived: But For What?
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Ever since the concept of a national industrial policy was proposed in the 1970s, it has received scorn from most neo-classical economists, with those advocating it treated as the economic equivalent of chiropractors. But recently the idea is getting a new life, largely because of the growing awareness of the economic, technology and national security threats posed by China. Case in point is the recent House Republican’s China Task Force Report.
A New Coalition, If You Can Keep It
As the pundits, campaigns, and lawyers continue to unpack this election, there are a few things we know for certain. First, the pollsters and mainstream media in this country do not speak for the majority of America. Not even close. Second, identity politics is an elite fetish without resonance or meaning to most people in the country, including minorities. And third, the political realignment in this country is further along than anyone in DC was ready to acknowledge.
Let’s Stop Scaring People About Technological Change
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. If you’re an average working person, going about your life, trying to put the next meal on your table, and happen to listen to the media and pundits talk about technology, your natural response is probably to vote a straight Luddite ticket in the next election.
Can the Left Overcome its Technopessimism?
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. In his excellent American Compass essay “The Five Deadly Sins of the Left”, Ruy Teixeira calls out the left for what he terms their “technopessimism”.
Shooting Down the Flying Geese Theory of Trade
Although neoliberal globalists are often said to be opposed to industrial policy and strategic trade, that is not necessarily true. Neoliberals of the kind who have dominated U.S. policy under the two Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are not orthodox anti-government libertarians. They support a particular kind of industrial policy, whose emblem is not the American eagle but the Japanese goose.
I Finally Agree With Krugman
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. I never thought I would find myself in wholehearted agreement with Paul Krugman. That is, until I ran across the following passage from his 1996 book Pop Internationalism: “If top government officials are strongly committed to a particular economic doctrine, their commitment inevitably sets the tone for policy making on all issues, even those which may seem to have nothing to do with that doctrine.
Refocusing Labor Policy to Unleash the American Worker
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. American workers are the backbone of this country. In the wake of the economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever to remove barriers burdening the American worker. On Capitol Hill, the Republican Study Committee’s American Worker Task Force has proposed bold new solutions that would empower our nation’s workers to face today’s challenges as well as tomorrow’s.
What’s the best way to help low-income workers? Automate low-income jobs.
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. As we celebrate Labor Day, reducing unemployment and getting the COVID-impacted economy back to some semblance of normality is clearly the top economic task. But when that is done the economy will still face a critical labor market problem: too many workers earning too little. A recent Brookings study found that 44 percent of American adults workers make very little, with median annual earnings of just $18,000.
Big Tech, Antitrust and America's Future
Aleksei - stock.adobe.com Wednesday’s “must watch” House Judiciary hearing with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google raised a host of questions, including what the goal of antitrust should be (maximizing economic welfare or other goals, like protecting small business), and how should we think about platform industries. There are two key central things to understand about the hearing.
China and Civic Piety
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to eradicate the Uighur Muslim population in favor of the Han majority are horrifying. Programmatic abortions and sterilizations, slave labor, and “re-education” camps recall atrocities of the past. At the same time, the CCP’s ambitions for Hong Kong outrage westerners committed to liberty and the rule of law. And its record for the treatment of prisoners and religious dissidents is miserable.
The Seduction of the Not-Profit Economy
Over the last several decades a major shift has occurred in how many U.S. elites – pundits, advocates, policy makers, and others – think and talk about corporations. For much of the 20th century most elites viewed corporations as an institutional tool by which America could best achieve its most important economic goals: innovation and increasing living standards.
Another Kind of Redistribution; The Case for a Job Guarantee Program
Sign up to receive The Commons posts in your inbox. Recent posts from Sam Hammond , Ed Dolan, and Oren Cass, have opened a very thoughtful debate on the role of redistribution in a future economic agenda. They rightly observe the corrosive effects of mindlessly expanding redistributive policies without addressing many of the flaws in our current system that give rise to the need for such redistribution in the first place.
All Productivity is Good: Even Automation
One of the few times when I have found myself in agreement with Paul Krugman is when he famously wrote, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.” Yet, today, this statement is not only passé, but downright suspect, at least among many U.S. elites.
Should There be Legal and Ethical Limits to National Developmentalism?
ITIF recently released a report about how “innovation mercantilist” policies were instrumental in enabling China to dominate the global telecom equipment industry, and how that rise came at the expense of global innovation in this industry. A typical response to the report was along the lines of “So what.
Doubling Down on R&D
Willy Shih’s essay “On Research and Development” provides critical lessons and advice for U.S. policymakers seeking to ensure that the U.S. economy does not fall behind China’s technologically. He is right that, absent a more active role for the federal government in R&D, it is likely that the United States will lose its lead in innovation – along with its military and economic advantages.
On Tax Incentives
Paul Krugman may insist that “the notion that nations compete is incorrect,” but reality proves him wrong. Countries not only compete, but increasingly do so for high value-added, innovation-based industries, such as advanced machinery, aerospace, biopharmaceuticals, semiconductors and computing, software, and automobiles. For example, the Made in China 2025 plan identifies eight key industries in which Beijing intends to win—and these do not include plastic toys and soybeans.
Moving the Chains
After decades of looking away as America’s supply chains migrated overseas, policymakers are finally facing the reality that dependence on foreign producers has weakened the nation’s resilience, its security, and its economy. When factories leave, not only the jobs but also the suppliers, the customers, the expertise, and the innovation go too. When a crisis strikes, vital supplies are unavailable. When productivity growth and innovation are needed, they are nowhere to be found.
In Praise of Big Internet: The Economic Importance of Internet Companies
It has become bipartisan sport to attack “Big Tech”, but most of the ire is directed at “Big Internet”: consumer-facing Internet companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber. While much of the so-called techlash is focused on the purported negative social impacts – abuse of data, platform bias, and other charges – underlying many of these attacks is a deeper critique: Big Internet provides little or no economic value.
Time for a Hegelian Synthesis on Trade and Globalization
German philosopher Hegel postulated that history progresses through thesis, antithesis and then synthesis. Today we are seeing the first two dynamics with trade policy and attitudes towards globalization; we desperately need the third. For over 40 years synthesis meant unbridled support free trade and globalization.
We Will NOT Run Out of Jobs
This seems like a strange headline given that the economy has recently shed almost 40 million jobs. But at some point with the development of a vaccine or an effective treatment, the economy will come back to normal. And when it does, so too will opposition to automation, at a time when we will need productivity more than ever to shrink the now massive debt-to-GDP ratio.
No, U.S. Manufacturing Is Not at an All-Time High
Daniel Moynihan once stated that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” This is no more true than with today’s debate over the health of U.S. manufacturing; a debate that is critical to get right if policy makers are to respond appropriately. Apologists for the status quo paint a Pollyannaish picture of U.S. manufacturing.
The Commons - American Compass
Social Media is an Engineering Disaster Waiting to Happen Share This The 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is the textbook example of an engineering disaster. You’ve probably seen the footage: In grainy black and white, what was then the third largest suspension bridge in the world twists and oscillates with increasing violence, empty but for a stalled-out Pontiac parked askew on its undulating deck.
Shaping structural change in an era of new technology
In recent years an idea has spread, repeated at countless conferences around the world and in op-eds, tweets, books and reports, that we are in a fourth industrial revolution, more transformative than any change in human history, that will, among other negative effects, lead to massive job losses and unemployment. Indeed, it seems you cannot attend Davos, a G20 summit, or a TED talk – one organised by the media organisation TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) – without hearing the warnings.
In Praise of Big Business: Part 2 (Why Government Policy Should be “Size Agnostic”)
In my blog last week, I drew from our forthcoming book Innovation Economics: the Race for Global Advantage (Yale University Press) to show how the current “small business is better” obsession is misguided and that in fact big business is the key driver of U.S. economic prosperity and competitiveness: it pays higher wages, is more productive, produces proportionally more patents, does more R&D, exports more and is a critical driver of job growth.
Don't put tax on robots
Legendary baseball player and fractured linguist Yogi Berra is claimed to have said, "It's deja vu all over again." Well, when we look for the descendants of British Luddites — the early 19th-century protesters who smashed new weaving machines — we have only to look around to folks like British Labor Party Leader Jeremy Corbin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and San Francisco City Supervisor Jane Kim, who have all called for a tax on robots.
Point: Is Trump ‘Making America Great Again’? – InsideSources
President Donald Trump, right, meets opera performers, accompanied by Chinese President Xi Jinping, as they tour opera performance at the Forbidden City, Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2017, in Beijing, China. Trump is on a five country trip through Asia traveling to Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines.
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