Dennis Kneale

In Dennis Kneale's opinion, capitalism has saved the world, and made it a better place. Globalization, so maligned by do-gooders, has managed to lift a billion people out of poverty in the past decade, tripling their per-capita income to boost them into the middle class. The indictment of capitalism often is well intended but off-base and misleading. We’re told personal income, adjusted for inflation, has gone nowhere in 10 or 20 years. Left out is buying power: In 1972, it took 200 days for the average worker to earn enough money to buy a washing machine; today, that’s down to just 24 days. Capitalism did that. It's time to start celebrating it.

The Internet has vastly improved and altered the world—but at what price, really? Like some alien species in a bad sci-fi film, moving from planet to planet to consume everything in its path, the Internet has destroyed billions of dollars in value, flattened dozens of industries, rendered existing technologies obsolete overnight, and wiped out a million jobs or more even as it sparked millions of new ones. This has gone beyond the much-vaunted “creative destruction” that Schumpeter extolled and which Netheads revered; this now is indiscriminate destruction, mindless and relentless and unstoppable. A techlover who has covered the business since 1983 looks
at the dark side of the Internet revolution.

For more than 25 years Dennis Kneale was a writer and editor for two of America’s finest print outlets: The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. But in 2007, Kneale switched to television, embarking on a six-year odyssey in the bizarro world of cable news. Print was dying, cable news had gone 24/7, and the mainstream masses were eagerly awaiting more. The real motivation, however, was this: he wanted to snag better tables in restaurants. Kneale wanted to be famous. None of that happened, but a lot of other stuff did, much of it alternately funny or frustrating, as he proceeded to occupy (and then got pushed out of) three anchor slots in six years. Take a peek, behind the camera, at the inner-workings of the media, the business world and the fragile human ego. Especially Dennis Kneale's.

It could happen to you—in fact, the higher you rise up the age and income charts, the better the odds that it will happen to you: You will get laid off. If you’re in your 50s, your chances of finding an equivalent full-time, long-term job to last the rest of your career are getting ever slimmer. What to do? A 35-year journalist, laid off for the first time in his life in February 2014, offers insights and advice, such as his Rule #2 for being jobless: During the day, no jammy pants; it invites procrastination and laziness. With tips on how-to network, how to “push through” on down days, and whether to use the f-word: “fired.”

We are mired in the worst recovery since the Great Depression. A revival is at hand, if only we will Unshackle Smallville—free the nation’s 23 small businesses of the thicket of local, state and federal regulations that have gone far beyond any sensible, efficient purpose. The 50 states passed more than 40,000 laws in 2013. Federal agencies impose almost 4,000 new rules annually, and the Federal Register now runs 81,000 pages, 54% more than in the 1980s. In the first three years of the Obama era, the number of new rules with an impact of $100 million or more soared by 75%. Washington regs, all told, now cost the economy $1.75 billion a year and counting. A third of this, easily, is overkill. Many rules are little more than disguised tax increases and a restraint on new competition. That’s no way to treat smallbiz, which provides 55% of all jobs in the U.S. and 66% of new hiring.