Opinion

L&T Publisher Earl Watt

If cell phones were around when I went to school, chances are I would not have the opportunities I have had thanks to receiving a quality education.

Mrs. Sprague confiscated my Frogger watch in seventh grade English, and that was advanced for the day. We had distractive devices. They just weren’t allowed.

There was a reason.

I wasn’t attending school to develop relationships with educators or for hugs and butterflies.

I was there to work.

As were generations before me.

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

For the most part, I congratulate myself on being relatively competent at managing technology. I don’t have an overwhelming fear of learning new apps or platforms and have even caught myself feeling a little smug when others profess terror at the prospect of updating their website or mastering a new program.

All smugness disappeared this week.

I got caught in a technology black hole over a $20 bill. I owed a company $20 for forwarding my email to me. This is something that should have taken less than a minute to resolve. Three days later, I was still battling.

The company was based in India. I won’t bore you with the details of why it was based in India or how this company was chosen (I had plenty of opportunity to question the choice over the last three days), but it has provided excellent service, and I had had no reason to believe it wasn’t a good choice. Until this week.

GUEST COLUMN, Vance Ginn, Kansas Policy Institute

Kansas ranks 14th nationally, with an overall score of 7.12, in the Economic Freedom of North America report published by the Fraser Institute. The ranking, based on 2023 data, places Kansas just outside the top quartile of states. That position tells a precise economic story. Kansas has restored stability after years of fiscal turbulence from the excessive spending under Governor Kelly and the lack of spending restraint to go with then-Governor Brownback’s tax cuts. And yet, the conditions for sustained acceleration have not been met.

The labor market illustrates the point. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Kansas’ unemployment rate has remained relatively low since 2021 and generally tracks close to the national average. That outcome reflects a labor market that has absorbed shocks without prolonged dislocation. But stability is not the same as expansion. Job growth in Kansas has largely tracked population growth rather than exceeding it, indicating limited growth in labor demand rather than a tight labor supply.

GUEST COLUMN, Judge Paul Michel, Inventors Defense Alliance

We live in arguably the most innovative and prosperous era in human history. My lifetime alone has seen numerous technological leaps that past generations could never have dreamed of, including the moon landing, the birth of the internet, and now the rise of artificial intelligence.

But this pace of transformation is historically the exception, not the rule -- and it may not continue much longer if the infringer lobby gets its way.

That's the lesson to be drawn from last year's Nobel Prize in Economics, which was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for explaining how innovation drives growth. Aghion and Howitt's research shows that the process of "creative destruction" -- new, better technologies continually replacing old ones -- rests on incentives such as patent rights, which push the best technologies to the top of the market by enabling innovative upstarts to compete with larger incumbents.