In his weekly internet address Obama announced today that he wanted to make cuts to all the departments in his government and streamline government spending. He also wants to “promote innovation.” Therefore, as one step, he has named Aneesh Chopra as his Chief Technology Officer (start at min 3:50 in the video below):
4/18/09: Your Weekly Address from White House on Vimeo.
Aneesh is being pulled from Virginia, courtesy of Obama’s BFF Tim Kaine.
Aneesh Chopra is currently Virginia’s Fourth Secretary of Technology serving Governor Tim Kaine. In this capacity, he leads the Commonwealth’s strategy to effectively leverage technology in government reform, promotes Virginia’s innovation agenda, and fosters technology-related economic development with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship…<
p>Secretary Chopra was awarded the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) 2007 State Leadership Advocacy Award, and was also recently named to Government Technology magazine’s Top 25 in their Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers issue, which recognizes the 25 individuals they believe help set the standard for using technology to improve government. [Link]
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p>In this new job Chopra will work very closely with CIO Vivek Kundra. Chopra actually recruited Kundra to work for Kaine in his old job. This is like when two college football players that are noted as a dynamic duo during their college years get recruited by the same NFL team and are expected to re-establish their chemistry and success in the pros. Well, this is the nerd version of that is what I mean.
This new appointment makes me even more sad that Sanjay Gupta did not accept the Surgeon General Post. Can you imagine if the two top engineers and the top medical doctor in the country were all Indian American? No Indian American would ever aspire to do anything useless ever again (like become a writer, artist, etc.).
Don’t forget Kal Penn now that he’s going to be working in the White House as the Associate Director of Public Laision!
3 in, the rest to go! No, I’m joking…
This is great recognition for the Indian (American) community.
Also a shot in the arm for the Indian geek stereotype. Indians are all IT type geeks.
If Sanjay Gupta had become surgeon general, it would have been coming of age for the Indian doctor/engineer model. All Indians are either doctors or engineers.
“No Indian American would ever aspire to do anything useless ever again (like become a writer, artist, etc.).”
Are you kidding me? That’s the most ignorant thing I’ve ever read. We can’t all be nerdy scientists.
He needs a haircut. Now.
Do you really think Abhi is serious, that he’s trying to insult his fellow bloggers and others?
What an absolutely joke of an appointment. The federal CTO is a non-technical guy with barely 3 years of government experience under his belt — that too in state government? What a travesty. Between this clown and Kundra it just goes to show all you need inside the Beltway is the right political connections (i.e. Tim Kaine and the desi uncle tech mafia). Both Kundra and Chopra are opportunistic agenda-pushers only interested in self-service, not public service. I’m waiting to hear about Chopra’s past indiscretions now — hopefully they won’t involve shoplifting dress shirts from JC Penney after graduating college. (That would be Mr. Kundra’s only claim to fame.)
Good to know Kundra kept his job after a scandal broke out in his previous DC office. In the SM news, Sonal Shaw got a formal job in the white house as head of the new Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Way to go.
Aneesh’s bio says he has B.A., and Masters in Public Policy. Not even a technical degree, let alone some technology experience, for becoming the Chief Technology Officer of the nation! But I heard him on YouTube and he is indeed a good talker. A key ingredient for success. Some things never change… 😉
Yeah, isn’t it interesting how technology and computing is viewed by people (and this administration) . To even hold a ceremonial post like the Surgeon General you have to have a medical degree. To be the Attorney General you have to have been an attorney. But apparently to be a “Chief Technological Officer” all that goes out off the window. Then again it is not that different from the way tech companies are run (and I use that word loosely) here in the US. Maybe Chopra stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
This is a classic example of the ever increasing divide between the humanities and the scientists in the West. The political class is almost entirely from the humanities disciplines, and though they disgruntedly acknolwedge that scientists should be allowed to live, there is completele agreement that scientists should not be allowed to occupy any powerful position where decisions are made. Please see this video by Grayling on Edge (especially after ~20 minutes).
M. Nam
Ya that would be nice – we might also have an Indian for Miss USA – Courtni Shabana Hall link = http://www.nbc.com/miss-usa-2009/delegates/in.shtml
True of the political, but not of the finanancial class. Since the 1980’s, with Solomon bros and then the creation of LTCM, finance has become more and more science dominated, with trading floors looking more like the mit campus as opposed to exceter skull and bones brigade. Arguably the most powerful financial institution in the world, and one no one knows of, renaissance technologies, only hires scientists and puts absolutely no value on the mba.
but alas, all has not worked out so well, as this is the class arguably most responsible for the economic meltdown.
Renaissance is just ONE amongst the 100s of Hedge funds that sprouted in the last 3-4 years. The MAJORITY of them are regular traditional hedge funds and not Quant funds like Renaissance. LTCM was a Quant fund and since its implosion people did realize excessive reliance on quantitative methods may not work.
12 comment makes it look like that somehow majority of high stakes financial players are “scientists”, which isnt quite the case.
Besides the world of Hedge funds isnt what it was in 2006 anyways (a deliberate understatement).
[link]
Wired article on the abuse of David Li’s Gaussian copula function is a must-read. For almost ten years, experts like Darrell Duffie and Paul Wilmott have been warning Wall Street that Li’s formula was not suitable for risk management. But when regulations are lax or non-existent, and incentives reward only short-term performance, who is going to listen?
So true. Personally witnessed and experienced this.
I went to Johns Hopkins with Chopra. He was head of the College Democrats and even then was becoming very well connected with senior figures in the Democratic Party. Whatever technical knowledge he has was gained on the the job. He spent much of the 90’s working with consulting firms focusing on health care and technology, which seemed strange given his background.
I am not sure I would agree with your last comment though. For whatever it is worth he did seem genuinely interested in public service and certainly would be earning more money in the private sector than in his new job.
Qualifications don’t mean anything if the suited booted gentry act like ignoramuses. For all their “scienctific” skills the Wall St jokers couldn’t care much about independent and dependent probabilities, mistaking one for the other, till everything collapsed.
If it were only that simple. Not many people would call men like larry summers, robert merton, and myron scholes ignoramuses, yet all have proven complete disasters as money managers. larry being responsible for the singlest biggest mony-losing trade (involving derivatives) at harvard management, robert and myron driving ltcm into the ground, and i believe myron’s latest fund is down 38% this year. Yet even warren buffet is in awe of their intelligence, while wisely declining to invest in any of their funds.
scientist are intellectuals, and like all intellectuals they fall in love with their theories. in the political world, we call them ideologues, but in the world of applied science, like quant-based trading, there’s no way to describe their behaviour.
the further one moves away from the natural world, the less reliable the scientific method becomes, since human behavior has a high degree of free will and chance. when predicting economic behaviour, these financial models often prove right in the long run, but they cannot survive a short term irrationality, which happens more than the black swan theory would indicate. thus wall street is littered with people who are brilliantly wrong, or even right but at the wrong time.
Can someone please post a link that shows where Mr. Chopra was born? What city and country? Thank you
It is only natural that scientists fall in love with their theories since there is so much of evidence, experimentation, and research involved. A scientific theory is very robust and some long standing theories – take evolution – have withstood the test of time and been found to be in line with the latest evidence. In science you are always trying to disprove theories, proof is for mathematics and philosophy, not for science. A scientist understands applied science to be something like engineering, not derivatives trading. There are any number of scientists – and quite a few philosophers – who are derisive of the assertion that economics is a science or even has any science to it! Because regardless of what happens economists are in love with what they call their “theories” and never abandon hypotheses or “theories” that have been refuted.
There is nothing wrong with the scientific method – the best we have and the simplest too. Entities such as free will have no empirical validity, rendering them useless for experimentation, without which scientific theory making is all but impossible. We have a very long way to go, and will have to make do with place holders, while economists and public policy practitioners of every stripe tool around with their pet assumptions. Economists generally get a free pass. While a kook like Velikovsky and biological creationists were laughed out of polite discourse in a matter of months, “economics” pontificators/cranks like Friedman and Greenspan continue to be taken seriously.
I am appalled at the amount of bashing of scientists that’s going on. Somehow the scientific temperment is a drawback and makes people unfit to lead??!!!
G W Bush, Harriet Myers, Alberto Gonzales, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheny, etc led America for the better part of the last decade. None of them had a scientific background. Yet no-one blames liberal arts / law for making people unfit to lead.
Think of the people like Benjamin Franklin, Edison, A.G. Bell, Bill Gates, Jack Welsh, Sergey Brin, etc. scientists / Engineers? Yes. If not for the leadership of scientists / engineers in Industry through the ages there would not have been a real economy,
As for the finance bunglers, their failure can be explained easily by upton sinclair “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Their theories worked out very well — for them. When a system offers several lifetimes pay in a single year to follow a course of action that is destructive to others, and at little personal consequence, well, what do you expect?
There were folks who made millions based on the flimsiest of rationales. The system offered great rewards to everyone to misguide the credit rating agencies. Did the people who were selling junk as AAA products know that their products were mispriced? Of course they did. That’s how they made a killing,
P.S. The majority of finance leaders were and continue to be liberal arts majors, not quants. The thinking behind it is given here http://financecareers.about.com/od/majors/a/majors.htm
did i say that? my main point is was that scientists hold postions of power in high finance, especially in the biggest baddest subsector of wall street over the last decade: hedge fund management…where top firms like de shaw, aqr, rennisnce, goldman sachs asset managemnt, soros’s quantum fund, hire from the science elite and have paid traders sums that dwarf their brehten at the traditional sell side banks, like morgan, merrrill, etc.
Now, how all this brainpower led to such a great crises is a topic for the ages. personally i see the fall of ltcm as a precursor, though there are certainly other culprits besides high financiers: the federal reserve, fannie and freddie, subprime lenders, clever no-doc borrowers, etc. but its the behaviour of the most sophisticated investors that needs explaining, which i attempted to try to do earlier.
as a sidenote, its a well established rule of thumb in the biotech vc world to discount the science of a company seeking funding. you will find so many brilliant researchers in this field convinced they have the ultimate treatment for brain cancer, chronic wounds, etc. they’re convinced its a slam dunk and and can explain the mechanism to you till you drop dead. they even have data that will knock your socks off.
but then you put the damn thing thru a true ph III trial and what happens?…the fucker doesn’t get approved. they fell in love with their theory. but unlike other intellectuals, they do eventually have to admit their mistakes.
Who are the others? If we are talking about the hedge fund world that means the traders fooled their bosses and limited partners in the fund. Actually, that has happenned before, buts its a case of the relative little guy outmaneuvering the bigger fish.
Lets assume you’re right. That means relatively unsophisticated salesman at the buldge bracket ibanks fooled the mit-educated traders at the top hedge funds. remember, this is not like the Internet scandal, where sophisticated investors (hedge funds, vc’s) sold shares, thru and ibank like in an ipo, to unknowing individual invesors with accounts at merrill and morgan.
here, the flow of money went the other way (subprime borrowers getting cash from commercial banks, banks selling the note to ibanks, ibanks selling them to hedge funds). the guy at the beginning of the pyramid scheme alwsys walks away the winner.
methings chopra’s getting hair tips from blagojevich.
@23, I love underdogs as much as anyone, but I don’t think transfer of wealth is so easily traced.
1) Some hedge funds shorted “subprime” – MBS, REIT, title companies, insurance companies, lenders, homebuilders — and made fortunes in 2007-2008. 2) Some buy-side hedge fund investments came from pension funds impacting little guys (“others”). 3) It was not just the hedge funds who bought MBS. Foreign central banks buying garbage with precious reservers under false premise (ratigns) hurt little guys in those countries. 4) Big guys were at least partially hedged against stock market wipeout, when average 401K investor who has been taught to “buy-and-hold” forever thinks hedges have something to do with bushes. 5) Most subprime borrowers at the beginning of the pyramid scheme got nothing in the end, except credit destruction, stress, unemployment, divorce and bankruptcy. Yes, some of them spent and enjoyed some of what they borrowed (cash-out refis). But bulk of what they borrowed remained in houses (upgrades, second home, remodel) prices of which crashed and would never recover. How many do you think flipped their Miami/Vegas condos and Inland Empire McMansion right at the peak in 06 and put that money in a portfolio shorting aig, citi, toll brothers, mbia, lehman and countrywide?