Why Democracies Never Move as Fast as Business, Science, Technology or Culture

Politics is likely to progress at a glacial pace compared to every other important way that the modern world is defined and created.

Architecture, music, business, science, athletics, engineering are all examples of fields that are defined and furthered by elites, by people who are in the top 1%. You don't have to get 55% of your population to master genetics in order to enjoy the benefits of genetic engineering. If even 1% of your population becomes skilled in genetic engineering, you can see transformative benefits.

By contrast, political policy and philosophy in a democracy depend on the majority. It's not enough for an elite few to gain special compassion or policy wisdom. Whatever story encapsulates this compassion or wisdom has to translate into the language of the crowd.

We are motivated by impulses that we don't really understand, impulses like the ones that make TV reporters, crowds and columnists cheer bombing raids, impulses that make us more distrustful of people with different coloring than us, impulses that make us more likely to empathize with someone beautiful with a petty need than someone ugly with a great need. Worse, we live in and depend on systems as complex as global climate, local ecosystems, a global economy and local housing market and our understanding of these systems is at best partial and at worst distorted. Even the best among us take on policy questions with some mix of distorted personal judgments and poor systems appreciation. And it is not our best who determine votes: it is the 51%.

It's a scary combination. Our technology advances at the speed of the top percentile and our policies advance at the speed of the 51st percentile.

Development, Social Evolution, and a Post-Economic Community

Apparently it is bad form to talk about communities being at different stages of development. It is supposedly demeaning of "less developed" communities. To me, though, this stage of history is so transitory that the differences between poor and rich countries is almost incidental.

One of the more important people in the Pharaoh's Court:
The Royal Manicurist

If you had a smattering of parents talking about their young children, the conversation would gravitate towards the perils of potty training, sleepless nights, tantrums, and speculation about whether toddlers are natural tyrants. No one would think it demeaning to suggest that it'd be a good idea for your two year old to learn how to control her bladder before heading to university. And no one would think for a moment that the fact that all the toddlers were going through nearly identical stages of development suggested that they were - or would grow up to be - nearly identical people.  Or that the child who is three years younger is going to be perpetually less developed than the older children. We all go through similar, necessary stages of development but we will end up with very different lives.

Communities that give their people fewer options about how to live a life - whether in the form of letting women stay single or providing young people with enough income to afford a place of their own - are less developed. Development involves an overlapping series of steps like accumulating and creating capital, educating children to become knowledge workers and popularizing entrepreneurship. (Something even our most advanced communities haven't quite done. Yet.) There is reason to believe that the roughly 7 or 8 centuries from about 1300 to 2100, a period in which we transition from abject poverty to something like widespread abundance, will take us from a starting point of a community based on shared superstitions through the creation of communities focused on overcoming economic scarcity into a post-economic community in which the questions of economic scarcity give way to larger, more interesting questions about how to live and what sorts of communities to create.

Social evolution has been playing out for thousands of years, since well before Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks brought humanity into history with writing, giving us a continuity beyond the scope of our own lives. Our own lives play out within a tiny little window of this evolution that is likely to continue for thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - more years.

Our society doesn't represent  the culmination of evolution. We are not the product of evolution: we are just part of a process that has and will play out for a longer time than we could ever imagine.

The Battle to Rise Above the Genetic Imperative

The Economist just tweeted out this fact of the day:
In 2007, Google searches for "Kim Kardashian" overtook searches for "climate change."

All the primates seem terribly interested in the lives of alpha males and their cohorts. They track who is in favor and who is out. Not just opportunities to mate but one's own survival can depend on how attuned one is to the social dynamics that determine who is in and who is out, who is popular and who is not. The politics of high school and who is popular have deep genetic roots.

Apparently this urge never stops. Last night visiting a friend who is dying in a hospice facility, he said that as he lays in bed his mind continues to come back to the same thoughts. "What thoughts," my wife asked. "The politics of this place. So many people think they are superior to you." To our dying breath, I thought. Wow. And then I realized that it is past that: "we" are going to heaven and you are not is one of the oldest stories of civilization. Not just in groups and out groups in high school but straight through eternity.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions are changing the climate. Chicago had no snow on the ground in January or February for the first time in 146 years. Permafrost that has been intact since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago is now collapsing. In states throughout the US, communities are setting new records for heat. Places in Oklahoma - home to our new EPA secretary who sees climate change as a hoax - hit 100 in February for the first time on record.

We did not evolve to worry about climate change in the same way that we evolved to worry about who is in and who is out in celebrity circles. It's stylish to berate the media for what they cover but right now our media is profit-driven. They don't have an incentive to cover what they should; instead, they have incentive to cover what we're programmed to care about. We do have these big brains but what they like to do is fixate on the same things the chimps do: food, sex, our progeny and social status. Religion was one attempt to raise people above the genetic imperative, imploring us to rise above the world, flesh and devil. Science and the modern world is yet another attempt to elevate our concerns to something that wouldn't occur to a fellow primate. No matter whether it's with pulpit or lectern, though, it's a tough battle to wage.

What if History Has Only Just Begun? Contemplating a Post Economic Society

If you bring together parents of little ones aged 0 to 3, you'll hear them discuss very similar - nearly identical - stages of development. Getting potty trained, sleeping through the night, learning to walk and talk, and learn self control are constants for every child. Those little ones may grow up to become very different people who make their living, pursue romance, create or engage in hobbies, struggle with wild bout of optimism or depression - that is, live their lives in wildly different ways but in the first few years of their life they're dealing with nearly identical issues.

Which brings me to economic development.

We have this tendency to think of ourselves as having reached the pinnacle of evolution. Probably amoeba and early primates had even greater difficulty conceiving of the possibility that evolution hadn't ended now that they'd arrived, but even we tend to think of ourselves as a culmination rather than an intermediate stop. Not just as humans but as a culture or civilization. And yet, we're so obviously still a work in progress, so obviously not yet done.

I think that we've not only entered a fourth economy but that this fourth economy will be less a culmination than a mere phase, perhaps the equivalent of learning to walk or talk. It will transform what is possible but the talking is incidental to the communication, the walking incidental to getting somewhere. In the same way that writing brought humanity into a new phase of history but didn't end history, so will moving beyond scarcity bring us to a new phase but hardly end the continuation of history. And once we've moved beyond scarcity, economics as we've learned it will be less defining than assumed, in the same way that we don't now talk about different communities around the globe having a talking or writing culture.

Having social inventions that allow us overcome the limits of capital or entrepreneurship will be pretty cool. What is even more interesting, though, is the question of what we do when we've overcome all four economic limits. At that point we have the harder but more difficult work of then determining what sorts of societies we want to create. Or, rather, the generations that will come after us will have that work.

Halfway Point of the Decade that Will Transform the Middle East

Arab Spring seems to have begun with Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian with 6 kids. Police had confiscated his vegetable cart – his livelihood - in December of 2010. When officials refused to hear his complaint, he protested by setting himself on fire. Within a month protesters had ousted Tunisia’s government.[1] 

This was the start of Arab Spring, a contagion of protest and revolution that swept through the Middle East. By 2013, the heads of state in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen had been chased from office and civil wars had started in two countries and protests in half a dozen others. These were protests orchestrated through Twitter and Facebook and played out in the streets with guns and tear gas. Secularists and religious groups have agreed to oust dictators but now have to agree about how to govern.

For me, this picture of the Camel with Google camera mounted on it seems to capture the Middle East's current, odd juxtaposition of old world and new better than anything I could imagine. 

Evolution is hugely defined by environment. The Middle East is going through democratic revolution and reform in such a very different environment than did the West that it will be fascinating to see what it produces. Hopefully, among the things it produces there will be at least a few more pictures like this. 

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[1] Jim Clifton’s The Coming Jobs War, (New York, NY, Gallup Press, 2011) Kindle location 558. 

Picture from Slate, video here.

Why iPay May Be Apple's Most Lucrative Product Yet

iPay may prove to be Apple's most lucrative product.

Today, Apple announced the release of two new iPhones, an iWatch, and iPay, which will work like a mobile wallet. They've teamed with various credit card companies like VISA, Mastercard and AMEX to enable iPhone users to simply pay with their phones as if their favorite device was a credit card.

On the surface that might sound fairly innocuous. They are certainly not the first to offer the ability to make a digital purchase, as reported by Molly Wood here. But it's worth remembering that Apple wasn't the first company to make a digital music player. They just made it wildly popular.

First, some background. During the 20th century, a quiet revolution transformed finance. One of the reasons it might have been so quiet is that it has the oddly eye-glazing name of banking disintermediation. But disintermediation gets to the heart of how the Information Economy transformed finance, which plays right into Apple's new market.

Once upon a time, bankers were uniquely positioned upon a wall that separated the folks saving money from those who wanted to borrow it. They could take money from the savers, paying them 1% for their money, and then loan it to the borrowers at 10% (less or more). Upon their wall, they were uniquely positioned to see each party, parties who could not see each other. Savers and borrowers didn't know each other so the banker played intermediary. This is a pretty lucrative position to be in. Still. (Last year Citigroup's revenues were $76 billion.)

But information technology has made it easier for borrowers and savers to find each other without the bank playing intermediary. As the cost of information has dropped, this wall separating borrowers and savers has slowly lowered, and with it the bankers' lofty perch. This disintermediation has a long history, one I explore in my book. The most recent instance of disintermediation is peer-to-peer lending. Lending Club, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2007, has facilitated $4 billion in loans. They are to lending what eHarmony is to romance. Why pay the banks the 9% difference between what you get for saving and she has to pay to borrow when you two can split the difference? There are billions - trillions - that can be retained within households by cutting out the bank. But of course far fewer people know and trust Lending Club than Apple.

Now Apple will get millions of people comfortable with the natural extension of what Dee Hock, VISA's founding CEO, realized years ago: money is just information. As millions of Apple users become comfortable with the idea of using their phones for purchases, it won't be long before they become comfortable using their phones - and the extensive networks they represent - for loans. People hate banks and love Apple. It's perfectly plausible that Apple's foray into finance will do to banks what their popularization of the iPod did to record companies.

And there is a lot of money to be had in finance. More, even, then in music.

Sex and Christianity - Same Sex Acceptance is Just Another in a Series of Revolutions

For centuries, the Catholic Church taught that every kind of sex was sinful. Well, all but one kind of sex: sex between married people who were - in that very instance - trying to make a baby. Sex between two women who didn't know each other's middle names or sex between a couple who were madly in love after 20 years of marriage was all sin if it wasn't part of creating the next generation.

Pleasure. Strengthening a relationship. Sex for such suspect reasons was sin.

Few Christians today would agree with that. What was so obvious in one century eventually became anything but obvious in another.

Social conservatives like to think that they are holding to something timeless. In fact, they are holding onto some notion of normal they learned when they were first forming their opinions about the world. It's true that what they believe falls into the category of  "how it has always been" but that "always" simply describes all they have ever personally known. Time doesn't even leave continents in one place, much less notions of normal.

History changes everything and you can see why this unsettling fact would lead so many social conservatives to reject the notion of evolution. Once you admit that things have continually changed, you have to admit that there's no reason your generation will be spared from - or ruined by - change.

Social Invention

In the 1700s and 1800s, technological innovations "just happened." Then in the 1900s, R&D labs within the military, universities, and corporations made technological innovation a regular occurrence. Technological inventions were both expected and managed. You may like your iPhone4 but you know that an iPhone5 will eventually debut. There is no expectation that any one piece of technology is the ultimate.

This century will be to social invention what the last century was to technological invention. It will become something we expect, whether through charter schools or new ways of managing employees or through new government agencies or even through the NGOs and foundations that have recently grown in number and impact.

More and more people are creating new kinds of banks and corporations, schools and governments. Soon, people will realize that this is the new process of society, not a one-time act. It will dawn on us in the same way that it finally dawned on Henry Ford that for all its genius, the Model T was not the final say in cars.

That, it seems to me, is worth thinking about.

Why Peter Thiel is Paying Kids to NOT Go To College (and why that's great)

Peter Thiel made a lot of money as an entrepreneur and investor. Now he has given away money to 20 kids under 20 to help fund heir entrepreneurial ventures. Oh, and to not attend college.

This is awesome.

It is no longer knowledge work that limits us. Unemployment rates for recent grads have never been so high. The information economy is ending the same way that the industrial economy ended about a century ago; not because information and knowledge workers are suddenly disappearing but because we have enough of both that they no longer limit.

What now limits our economy is entrepreneurship. In order to really break that limit, the corporation will have to transform the role of (at least a few - many many) employees into that of entrepreneur. But the corporation is not the only place where entrepreneurship needs to be encouraged.

Think about a world where instead of kids serving 2 years in the military after high school or spending 2 years in a church mission, they spend two years engaged in a start up. Think of what they would learn, what questions this would force them to ask, what skills they would acquire, what problems they'd solve, and how much having even thousands - much less millions - of kids engaged in such a way each year. Of course, if we did that, think of how disruptive those kids would be to the traditional education system once they had engaged in such experiences. To accommodate them, universities would have to transform (as if that would be a bad thing.)

Practically speaking, I think the money would be better spent on kids fresh out of university rather than high school. Thiel himself became an entrepreneur after getting a BA and JD from Stanford.

You can't comment on the direction a car is going when it is parked at the curb. Thiel should be applauded because he's giving us more of what we have so little at the expense of what we have in such abundance. Millions of kids go to university. Thiel has just diverted 20 of them into entrepreneurship instead. That - it seems to me - is hardly excessive. In fact, it seems like a very, very small start to something that could be huge.

Fashion: the Consumer as Status Symbol

Another excerpt from the book, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization from 1300 to 2050. This is from the chapter on the information economy.

“Man is a social being. We can never explain demand by looking only at the physical properties of goods. Man needs goods for communicating with others and for making sense of what is going on around him. The two needs are but one, for communication can only be formed in a system of meanings. His overriding objective as a consumer, put at its most general, is a concern for information about the changing cultural scene.”

Mary Douglas[1]

Fashion – Could Any Social Invention More Obviously Be a Social Invention?

The purpose of fashion is to stimulate demand. It’s a pretty brilliant ploy, really, to compel people who have a perfectly good product to replace it.

The new production methods worked very well for making clothes. In the decades after Crowell’s success with continuous production, the textile and garment industry grew about two or three times as rapidly as any industry. By 1915, only steel and oil were larger industries than the clothing trade[2].

“’The way out of overproduction.’ Wrote one fashion expert, ‘must lie in finding out what the woman at the counter is going to want; make it; then promptly drop it and go on to something else to which fickle fashion is turning her attention.’” Constant change was essential to prosperity of manufacturers and retailers.[3]

The information economy was rich in symbols used for communication and computing. The genius of fashion is that it made the consumer’s goods a symbol, one they would pay dearly to enhance and maintain. In an age that was - at least politically - increasingly democratic, fashion was an important symbol of status, signaling rank. Fashion became fashionable just as aristocracies faded. Fashion made the consumer a symbol. 

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[1] James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) 101.

[2] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 93.

[3] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 94.

And the Nation-State Gradually Grows More Obsolete

Political crises in the Middle East are spilling across borders in the same way that the financial crises did in the West in '08.

This latest burst of panic and protests seems to support the notion that whether it is pandemics, ecological issues, economic issues, or, yes, political and financial issues, national borders seem less and less relevant.

In places like the Middle East and Africa where colonial powers imposed national borders where no clear nations existed, borders have long seemed confusing and of little use in protecting one country from issues in the next. But now, even in the West where national identities date back centuries, national borders are becoming less meaningful.

The big question in '08 was whether the financial crisis could be averted before we had another Great Depression. The big question in 2011 is whether the political crises will create democracies, theocracies, or even more severe autocracies in the Middle East.

To me, the even bigger question is how the idea and even very fact of the nation-state is going to survive in this new stage of globalization.

Making a Game of Education

Games provide flow but rarely provide meaning. Education provides meaning but rarely provides flow. Time to bring gamers into the classroom?

Csikszentmihalyi has spent decades studying flow, the psychology of what engages and absorbs people. It seems to me that successful game designers are experts at creating flow. However, even though games offer an abundance of flow they don't offer much meaning; success at games rarely changes society or provides a living to the game player.

By contrast, education is meaningful. A degree can lead to a job and the work started in pursuit of an education can lead people to rethink society at its most basic level. (The founding fathers, for instance, were all students of the Enlightenment.)

It seems as though there is enormous potential that could come from creating a dialogue between educators and game designers. Perhaps the simplest thing would be to have gamers either enter the classroom or study curriculum to look for opportunities for creating flow. These gamers could work with educators on one simple, but impactful, goal: increase the amount of time each day that students spend in flow. Once they reach a critical point in this - say, once students are in flow for 20% of the day - they could begin to share educational practices.

I suspect that this seemingly simple goal would have profound implications for education. One condition for flow is feedback on how one is doing. Another is a balance between skill and challenge. Yet another is a clear goal. Creating flow experiences for students would mean - among other things - changing how and how rapidly students receive feedback. It would mean accepting where students are and starting there before pulling them to the next level (maintaining a balance between challenge and skill). And it would mean thinking about which goals would be meaningful to 8 or 10 or 14 year olds. This would mean redesigning education.

For now, education still seems heavily influenced by the goals and setting of religious instruction from the early days of formal education. We generally don't trust pleasure or the child's impulses as guides to learning. Beliefs from this orientation form a pattern. Children's attention needs to be directed with rebukes and reminders. Students may find education distasteful, but with enough self discipline, students can succeed. We cannot trust the self but instead have to repress it. And feedback comes instead in the form of judgment, often long after the task is done.

But what if we thought instead that what humans find naturally fascinating is, itself, a basis for an education? What if educational success was less a matter of self discipline than passion? And what if the joy a baby finds in learning to walk or talk is something that could continue to animate learning into one's 30s or 60s?

One last thing that I'll mention about the benefits that would follow from this approach to designing education is simply this: many of the same issues of flow and meaning that need to be addressed in education need to be addressed in knowledge work. Advances in education could hardly be contained to learning but would impact productivity as well.

Instead of telling kids to leave their games outside the classroom, maybe we should ask them to bring them in.

Living Somebody Else's Life - Beyond Inherited Goals to Corporate Transformation

We inherit goals. Personally, we find ourselves living within systems that have been designed by previous generations for their goals. Not just people but even institutions inherit goals.

The new nation-state first saw itself in a role like that of the Medieval Church. The church made itself responsible for the souls of its congregants and the early kings' gave themselves a similar role. The resultant chaos and bloodshed that came from centuries of religious wars was atrocious. It literally took centuries for the nation-state to ignore the goal of the church and instead focus on goals like the safety and prosperity of its citizens.

The corporation, too, seems to have first accepted the goal of the previously dominant institution. In this case, the corporation tries to imitate the goal of the bank, to make money, or, more specifically, to provide a return on capital. This misses the point. I've heard Russell Ackoff and Peter Drucker each make the point that profit is to a corporation what oxygen is to a person: vital but by no means its goal.

Corporations today, like the nation-state after the Reformation, is the most dominant institution. One of the keys to it realizing its potential to make life better for communities is that it treat profit not as the goal but as just one of its necessary conditions. Even if this were all that were involved in transforming the corporation, it would mean a large shift in how we think about our world. The good news is that once people begin thinking about the goal of the corporation beyond making money they will begin the process of reinvention. Then we will more often see the many and way cool things it can be.

The Deep Roots of America's Gun Culture

Along the 2,000 miles of border between San Diego and Corpus Christi, there are about 6,700 gun dealers. All on the American side, of course: guns are illegal in bullet-ridden Mexico.

Perhaps the reason that Americans love their guns has its roots deep in the collective history of Western Civilization.

The conservative impulse is always a desire for what once was, a pull towards some idealized past. This is not to say that it is at odds with progress: Renaissance thinkers sought to return to what they saw as the glorious past of the Greeks and Romans. They were not deliberately trying to create something new but were, instead, trying to revive the classical world that had died centuries before.

Conservatives try to retain what is – or even return to what they imagine once was. Religious conservatives feel a pull towards a past in which the church could define society. Social conservatives want to return to an imagined past in which social mores were more clear, were simpler, when mores were more moral.

Without understanding what came before the nation-state, one can’t really understand the love of guns in this country. It seems to have its roots in feudal Europe, a pull towards an idealized world that came before the rule of the state.

Few realize that feudal Europe was a world in which disputes were settled by, well, feuds. There was no recognized central government and if two families or regions or people had a difference, they settled it through negotiation, trickery, or force.

Although clergy were prohibited from carrying arms, everyone else was expected to be armed and prepared to defend himself. Rights were not guaranteed but had to be fought for and “war” regularly broke out between families, groups, and even individuals. Although this seems to us like anarchy, these feuds were one characteristic of feudalism.

Medieval society was closer to anarchy than anything we know of as a modern nation-state. Force was used to settle issues and anyone could wage war against anyone else. Feuds were common in this age of feudalism. If this seems primitive, American readers might do well to remember what happened to the chief author of the Federalist Papers, which did so much to define the United States. Even for him, law did not offer an honorable resolution to disagreement: Hamilton, the first American Treasury Secretary, was killed in a duel because Aaron Burr thought that Hamilton’s criticism ruined his candidacy. The bill of rights that included a right to bear arms drew from this earlier time of feuds when the individual distrusted government’s monopoly on power. Even this constitutional genius had more regard for honor than law; culture changes slowly and involves more than just reason. Although they didn’t use pistols, many a medieval man died as did Hamilton, although for them there would have been, for them, no alternative of resorting to law rather than a personal duel or feud.

Conservatives today have a love of guns because theirs is still an uneasy trust in the machinations of justice as administered by the state.

Now for us normal people, the thought of justice administered by force rather than law or reason seems unreasonable. And perhaps many conservatives would articulate the same thing. But in some deeper recess of their coerced social evolution, they still pull back from the idea of ceding power to faceless bureaucrats. The right to bear arms becomes sacred because it represents at a real and visceral level the last bastion of resistance against the monopoly on power that the state uses as the basis for everything else it imposes upon its citizens – from laws, regulations, and taxes. 

Redefining the Nation-State as a Phase of Life Instead of Place

More Americans are retiring in Mexico. It costs less to live there.

Mexicans are still trying to come to the US for work. Jobs pay more here.

What if, over time, nation-states are less places than way stations for phases of life? What it will mean to be American is that you have a good job. What it means to be Mexican is that you are retired. You know, sort of like what it means to be  New Yorker or a Floridan.

"Mom, where do people go when they die?"
"South America, honey."

Breaking the Handcuffs of History - From Stimulating the Old Economy to Creating a New One

I'm a firm believer that the farther back one goes into history, the further ahead one can predict. This, of course, depends on understanding patterns and dynamics that drive events. As much as I love history as a means for understanding how we got here and the direction we're heading, I often see history used as a way to define what is possible rather than create new possibilities.

In today's economy, there are frequent parallels drawn to FDR and the slow recovery from the Great Depression. I'm not sure that the right lessons have been drawn from this.

WWII seemed to have ended the Great Depression. Industries like information technology and commercial aviation were direct products of the war effort. Industries like pharmaceuticals and media were less obviously a product of the war than of the many beneficiaries of the GI Bill that created so many knowledge workers who, in turn, created or made possible new industries so dependent on knowledge workers.

One lesson is that if we also stimulate the economy and fund education, we'll also stimulate GDP and create jobs. This is partly true - as can be seen by the fact that we've partly accomplished these goals. (GDP is again rising; unemployment stays disturbingly high.) But it seems to me that there is a more important lesson.

FDR partially, and the second world war more completely, didn't just nudge the economy towards full employment. FDR created entirely new departments and government bureaucracies in addition to the new industries that were spun off from the war effort. It wasn't just that old industries and government agencies employed more people: entirely new industries and agencies created jobs.

Bush started - and then Obama continued - a huge stimulus package. But neither have actually helped to create new industries.

Alternative energy is the obvious new industry that could be created by government initiative. Others include longevity enhancement, nanotechnology manufacturing and repair, commercial "space" travel, and mental health through cognitive science (and not just pharmaceuticals) to name just a few.

To date, the attempt to create jobs by cutting taxes for corporations and buying bonds from banks has proven wildly inadequate. Corporations now sit on top of a record $2 trillion in cash - money that's not being used to create products, processes, or jobs. Banks are still not loaning. Corporations and banks have money but they are not creating.

Instead of wasting stimulus potential through tax cuts and bank financing, the government would do well to directly fund the creation of new technologies and companies. Yes, fund new companies that represent new industries that would absorb displaced workers and hire new ones.

The real lesson of the recovery from the Great Depression is not to merely stimulate the old economy. It is, as well, to help play midwife to new ones. Until we're that bold, I think that our recovery is going to look more like Japan's decade long stagnation than any previous recovery we've enjoyed.

What if Twitter & Facebook Were Revolutionary?

When we listened to just a few, we listened a long time. Politicians and pundits were expected to go on at length - speeches and programs of 30 to 60 minutes, essays and books that were hundreds of - or even a hundred thousand - words.

But today's model is less about spending time with a few respected voices than spending time with lots and lots of friends and friendly - or not so friendly - voices. Even if we double the time we spend collecting news and opinion, we have to fragment it over more and more people. This necessarily forces concision, forces us to condense our thoughts into fewer words. 

Brain cells continually communicate with each other, but they are very efficient at it. These cells tend to communicate by exception, minimizing the "I'm here" signal. The brain already burns an enormous amount of energy even with this minimalist model. This efficiency is the only way to allow billions of cells to be connected. 

Facebook status comments, tweets, and texts seem to be moving us towards this model of communication over a broader net of people - a truly distributed model that doesn't dispense long messages outwards from some central point (like radio or TV) but instead sends lots and lots of short messages between nodes, or people. This model is not about hierarchy; it is about connection. 

For centuries, the progression in the West has been towards dispersing power outwards rather than concentrating it in a few. It seems as though we are now rapidly evolving a communication and reporting model that supports this more than ever. 

Stay tuned: power follows the flow of information and communication. Our old institutions that place power at the top - from church and schools to governments and corporations - are going to rapidly evolve as the communication structures that hold them in place shift. In fact, they used to call this kind of thing revolutionary. This could get really interesting. 

About the Only Thing We Know for Sure

This matter of job creation is not trivial. I believe that we've hit an inflection point, a point of transition from one economy to the next akin to the transition from agricultural to industrial, or industrial to information economy. Making this transition will require shifts in how corporations, schools, universities, and governments are managed and how policy is formulated.

There are many questions that have to do with the issues of how to create jobs, reverse wage stagnation, and lower unemployment. (These are related but separate issues.)

But in the midst of the uncertainty about how best to lower unemployment we do know at least one thing. Fiscal austerity - deficit reductions - that would result in massive layoffs of government workers and government contractors won't lower unemployment. This is one of the few certainties we have in the midst of so many questions.

And yet, sadly, the Republicans who've just won office seem convinced of only one thing: fiscal austerity - deficit reductions - that would result in massive layoffs of government workers and government contractors is the one thing that will make this country better.

I guess it is just the height of optimism to wish that after the Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld promises we'd have learned that there is a big difference between conviction and actually being right.

About the only thing we know for sure is that slashing government spending would cause this economy to stall. And yet, this seems about the only thing the Republicans are convinced of.

Just the Way Things Are

Once a myth is seen to be a myth, it no longer is. That is, if you call a myth a myth it no longer functions as a myth, as a way to make sense of the world that people believe in. The people who believe something is a myth no longer believe in it.

I wonder if a philosophy is similar. Today, pragmatism is characterized by the fact that people don't think of this philosophy as a philosophy. To call yourself pragmatic is, of course, to say that you are not ideological or philosophical.

Once we see pragmatism as every bit as philosophical as the Enlightenment before it, we might begin to find it lessen its hold on our collective consciousness.

Waking Up From the American Dream

David Brooks has an interesting column in which he essentially gives a platform for David Platt.

Platt is a preacher who thinks that it is time for us to give up the American dream of living better. This reconsideration of the American dream is not unique to the religious world. People like Michael Polan, who argue for eating locally grown foods, are also suggesting that health and happiness might lie down a path of moderated consumption.

I am sympathetic to these notions. I've argued more than once that one of the characteristics of the new economy will be a shift from an emphasis on quantity of goods to quality of life. But I think that Platt probably gets something wrong.

Progress rarely means going back. The way out is forward.

In the early 1900s, consumer credit and the birth of mass consumption that made mass production profitable was challenged by the religous groups. They pointed to Paul's injunction to "owe no man" as evidence of God's disapproval of credit. For them, credit was a social evil and the thought that people might be free to buy goods simply because these made them happy was itself a little sinful.

But credit is an essential part of the modern economy and so is consumption. I do think that we'll consume fewer "things" in the future. Already we've shifted to spending an increasing amount of money on virtual products rather than real ones.