100 Years Ago Today Women Got the Right to Vote - and Reinvented What It Meant to be a Woman

100 years ago today women gained the right to vote in national elections. Two points about that.

One, product and social invention are often intertwined.

20 years before 1900, a woman would carry about 10 tons of fuel (wood and coal) and 40 tons of water in and out of the house each year. The invention of running water and electricity made it easy for more women to shift their focus outside the home. The woman as a political force was born.
In 1960, the Pill was approved and women could decide whether and when to have children. In 1968, Yale began to admit women. Today, more women than men earn university degrees. The woman as an economic force was born.

Two, progress has a clear direction: it gives more people more ability to live a life of their own choosing.

There is a simple question to determine to ask of a policy question: will this ultimately give more people more options? Healthcare coverage that lets more people live longer, healthier lives is progress. A population that lives to an average age of 85 has more options about what to do with a life than one that lives an average of 55 years. Educational policies that give more kids more options about what to do for a living or how to shape or make sense of their world is progress. Making it easier for more people in a community to vote is progress. Environmental policies and technology that promise to give the billions of people who will be living here in 100, 300, and 500 years just as many (or more) options to enjoy nature and affluence are progress.

Giving women the right to vote - like ending slavery or radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions - will never be considered radical by future generations. It is the sort of thing that makes future generations think that "they" (that "we") must have been a different species.

Communication and transportation technology is continually being reinvented. So is what it means to be a woman. Progress moves forward on a series of inventions, some technical, some social and all with the potential to disrupt.

100 years ago, women got the right to vote. And given how differently they vote, it was none too soon.

Popularizing Systems Thinking

Models of complex behavior increasingly sit at the background of vital political discussions like global warming and pandemics. It is time to make them a more integral part of our political discussion. Until voters can understand and participate developing models to predict the behavior of systems, we will have unstable politics, particularly in a country like ours that puts so much stock in the opinion of everyone. This country was defined by a way of thinking. It’s time to expand that.

Our founding fathers did not pioneer Enlightenment thinking but they were the first to create a community organized around it. The Enlightenment shifted people from a reliance on authority and tradition (church and king) to reason and debate (science and democracy). Our founding fathers popularized education – most notably, Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia – with an emphasis on rhetoric and analysis as essential to creating smart voters. They generally believed that education was necessary to freedom and democracy. But as it turns out, rhetoric is a poor way to understand or communicate complexity. We need to update what constitutes a good education.

Today we have expert systems thinkers but we haven’t popularized systems thinking, made it a part of the way we organize and act or even a part of what we include in education. Analysis focuses on parts at one point in time; systems thinking focuses on interactions over time, like how viruses spread at different rates depending on how we behave or how CO₂ builds in the atmosphere depending on our technology. Systems thinking is as important to an effective democracy in this 21^st century as Enlightenment philosophy was to an effective democracy in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. We can’t coherently debate systems as varied and crucial as our financial, environmental, education, and healthcare systems with fluency in systems thinking.

Hearing Bill Gates talk about a pandemic in 2015 and how serious it will be, he mentions what "our models told us." Listening to California governor Gavin Newsom in press conferences, he, too, references "our models." Models have the potential to explain futures we haven't yet experienced. Models will never be perfect; they can, however, be sufficient to inform good policy.  Once you understand compound interest, you may not be able to predict how much wealth you’ll have in 30 years but you know what to do: invest early and often to maximize that wealth. Once you understand how rapidly the coronavirus can spread, it informs policies like shelter-in-place. Even though models are sensitive to changes in assumptions and inputs, they can still point us in the right direction. The better people understand them, both their limits and the insights they provide, the more credible and helpful these models.

I work with really bright scientists and engineers to plan – or model – their projects to develop new products like drugs, medical devices and computer chips. Two benefits inevitably follow. One, each person gets insights into what others are doing and how that impacts them. Good models are key to coordination. Two, they learn more of what is possible as they play with the model, play a game of “what if” to see how they might accelerate launch. “What if we hired one more circuit engineer?” “What if we doubled the number of clinical trial sites so that we could enroll patients more quickly?” The models let them answer what-if questions and become tools for making really smart people even smarter, in the same way that a spreadsheet can help a financial planner to get and communicate insights. Models that a group jointly creates and maintains could be used to inform an entire populace about their policy options on issues like economic stimulus, global warming, or the spread of a pandemic. Even very simple models can help to illustrate important dynamics more clearly than rhetoric.

Democracy depends on education. Change is accelerating. We’re increasingly dependent on systems. Education needs to include system thinking. In a crisis like a pandemic, we have to react to what the models predict about consequences because if we wait to react to actual consequences or rely on our intuition (intuition informed by completely different circumstances) our actions will be tragically late. Models let us learn from the past and from possible futures. The AI that recently beat the world champion Go player Ke Jie was able to make a move no one had ever before seen, a move learned from millions of game simulations it had simulated play even before playing its “first” game with Ke Jie. When a community encounters something like the coronavirus, it would be nice to be at least as prepared as one might be for a game of Go.

There are a variety of ways to popularize systems thinking. One way might look like video games. Imagine kids learning about global warming or economic development by getting exposed to simple models that play out over time. They first learn to turn the knob on this variable and then that variable. They see which variables are akin to the butterfly's wings in Brazil that causes a snowstorm in Minneapolis and which are akin to a hundred moths beating their wings uselessly against a light bulb. Over time they begin to introduce their own data, their own variables, or even change the structure of the model. The class as a whole could build a model that represents their collective insights and predicts outcomes few – if any – minds are sophisticated enough to foresee.

Good education changes life outside the classroom. Eventually democracy might mean that we have collective, online models that represent our best knowledge and are as widely understood as an op-ed or debate. Policy could come out of millions of simulations that are largely transparent and contributed to and understood by millions of citizens. Perhaps working on models will become as much a part of citizenship as working on campaigns or reading and arguing about op-eds. In the same way that a car lets us travel further than we could on foot, good models can let us create better policy than we can with debates.

Ron Davison lives in San Diego County, wrote The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization and works with teams in Fortune 500 firms and startups to accelerate product launch. @iamrondavison

A Preview of What Alternative Energy Could Mean for the Health of our Planet

Per the Economist, by the 21st of March in most cities trips planned had dropped by 70 to 90%. People are traveling and polluting less - about 10 to 30% of what they normally would.

We are going to get such great data on what a difference dramatic drops in pollution levels make from this crisis as we all enjoy bluer skies and - in the face of a respiratory epidemic - actual decreases in asthma-related cases. (*Note - Ron is not a medical expert. He's just speculating on this point. Obviously rises in COVID-19 cases would dwarf drops in asthma due to drops in pollution. But if you can avoid the virus AND enjoy less pollution ...?)

In the mid 1800s, we slaughtered whales for oil to use on machinery in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. By 1900 we were using petroleum oil, a huge improvement. And now we're about to make another great improvement. a move to alternative energy. That can be accelerated with broader public support.

This trial period might help to raise that support by providing us a taste of what is possible, a preview of coming attractions.

Republican Fondness for Conspiracy Theories

The folks at Public Policy Polling asked Americans about conspiracy theories. As it turns out we like them. And curiously, folks who voted for Romney are more likely to believe in a good conspiracy theory than are the folks who voted for Obama.

Here's a table showing the ratio of Romney to Obama supporters who believe in a particular conspiracy.

	Voted For
Conspiracy	Obama	Romney	Ratio
Believe Global Warming a Hoax?	12	61	5.1
Believe Obama is Anti-Christ	5	22	4.4
Believe in lizard people	2	5	2.5
Believe in New World Order	16	38	2.4
Believe Sadam was involved in 9/11	19	36	1.9
Believe UFO Crashed at Roswell?	16	27	1.7
Believe govt spreads chemicals thru plane exhaust	3	5	1.7
Believe pharma and med invent new diseases to make $	11	17	1.5
Believe govt controls minds thru TV	12	18	1.5
Believe in Bigfoot	12	15	1.3
Believe McCartney died and was replaced	4	5	1.3
Believe Vaccines Cause Autism	19	22	1.2
Believe in JFK conspiracy	47	54	1.1
Believe aliens exist	28	28	1.0
Believe govt adds fluoride for sinister reasons	8	8	1.0
Believe Moon Landing was Fake	6	5	0.8
Believe govt allowed 9/11 to happen	13	8	0.6
Believe CIA spread crack in inner cities	17	10	0.6
Believe Bush misled on WMDs in Iraq	69	18	0.3

Voters come together on a belief in aliens and the government adding fluoride for sinister reasons.

They are sharply divided over whether global warming is a hoax and whether Bush misled on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Note that the question is not whether the science on global warming is dubious or incomplete: 61% of Romney supporters actually think global warming is a hoax that scientists are perpetuating at the expense of innocent oil companies, politicians, and talk radio personalities.) That seems predictable given politics.

It's less clear why Romney supporters would be about twice as likely to believe that a UFO crashed at Roswell or in lizard people.

The fact that Republicans are more likely to cozy up to a good conspiracy doesn't prove that the GOP platform is carefully crafted to appeal to the interests of average Americans while helping only a select few. Then again, if you could prove such a claim it wouldn't be much of a conspiracy, would it?

Globalization - tipping the hat to reality

Since about the 16th century, a form of globalization has been in full swing. Trade, conquest, and information exchange has simply increased since then, as Portuguese and Dutch trader's exotic 16th century travels has now become the stuff of today’s spring break vacations.

But it is difficult to talk about globalization when the term is so fuzzy. I’d like to suggest two dimensions to globalization. One is the increased trade of goods, services, and information that spills across national boundaries like trade winds. The other is the construction of agreements and institutions to give a structure to this reality. Call the first globalization flows and the next globalization structures.

At this point, it is hard to imagine anything short of a catastrophe limiting globalization flows. It takes far less imagination to envision hiccups, disruptions, and derailing of the process of globalization structures.

In this country, conservatives and liberals are united in their fear of globalization flows as a force that will erode national autonomy. For liberals, globalization threatens a return to the days before Teddy Roosevelt when labor and the environment lay unprotected from the rapacious advances of robber barons. For conservatives, globalization means that the US will be like Europe, our masculine independence threatened by blue helmeted troops more inclined to act like bureaucrats than cowboys. Some conservatives even see the emergence of global institutions as heralding the coming apocalypse.

American fundamentalists are not the only ones who see globalization flows as a threat. It is no coincidence that Al Qaeda terrorists brought down the World Trade Center Towers. Trade brings with it strange customs and ideas that defy regional cultures. The Renaissance and Enlightenment were led by communities active in trade; along with the taste for foreign products came openness to foreign ideas. Local clerics, just as much as local merchants, could be put out of business by foreign trade. If Al Qaeda could disrupt world trade, they might succeed at protecting their daughters from the bump and grind of hip hop, their sons from the allure of materialism.

For now, globalization structures have been largely left to the institution best suited to the realities of globalization flows – the modern corporation. And the corporation has seemed to do the most to define the globalization structures. The WTO, GATT, IMF, and the World Bank regulate globalization flows in ways that seems to most clearly benefit corporations.

Many people forget that one of the key motivators for the emergence of the modern nation-state was the gain in trade. In 1550, a European trader would literally pay tolls about every six miles. Nation-states created a huge free trade zone that encouraged trade and specialization - two boons to productivity. Globalization structures is similar in that it suggests the creation of institutions that do for world trade what the nation-state did for "national" economies.

But done wrong, globalization structures could be a realization of the fears of liberals and conservatives alike. If these institutions are lackeys to the corporation, they could indeed become an instrument for direct attack on the progress of labor unions and environmental activists, a race to the bottom for wages, benefits, and regulations. Conservatives fears of a loss of autonomy, an inability to stand up against countries with different traditions and values, could also be realized. But done well or done poorly, globalization structures is a deed that must be done. To ignore the importance of these institutions is to ignore the degree to which globalization flows can destroy or build communities.

The reality is that we live on a globe and the use of nation-states is a convenience, a tool to improve quality of life. Ideas like Sweden, South Africa, and Canada are social constructs. Greenhouse gases may emerge from a particular national economy, but they disperse perfectly throughout the atmosphere. Terrorist’s cells may meet in a particular country, but their ideology - like McDonald's - is not constrained by national boundaries.

The nation-state has evolved since the time of Louis XIV. Advances like human rights, environmental protection, and worker rights need to be built on, not crowded out as the work of globalization structures takes places.

The good news is the bad news. We’ve entered a phase of human history when no community can be isolated from this simple truth – we live on a globe and share a fate. Institutions that pretend otherwise are institutions that will become increasingly ineffective.

Will the Nation-State Be Obsolete by 2100?

I wonder if the nation-state hasn't outlived its usefulness.

City-states had largely disappeared by the time of the Enlightenment. By the time that Germany and Italy became nation-states in the late 19th century, most of the West had coagulated into nation-state form. A nation-state had more military power than a city-state and by eradicating trade barriers within the country, nation-states stimulated trade and prosperity. Conditions of the 18th and 19th centuries seemed to make the city-state obsolete; perhaps the conditions of the 21st century will make the nation-state obsolete.

In today's world, the nation-state seems increasingly ineffectual at dealing with real problems. It isn't particularly suited to the major issues of the present. Pandemics, terrorism, financial crisis, immigration, trade, economic prosperity and, of course, global climate change are all issues that thumb their noses at national boundaries. Already in Europe, nation-states are gradually giving more power over to the EU. I suspect that this is a trend (that will, as all such trends, suffer reversals).

It is difficult to think of what nation-states are still uniquely suited to do; they still seem to have a monopoly on starting truly horrific wars. We now have about 200 nations on this little planet. It's not obvious that we can afford for even 10 or 20 percent of them to be strutting around with nuclear-equipped armies. It might make sense to emasculate the nation-state before this creation of ours destroys us.

“If you said, ‘Let’s design a problem that human institutions can’t deal with,’ you couldn’t find one better than global warming.”
- Henry Jacoby, MIT School of Management