Renewing American Vigor: Consumption and Production

In spite of the way this title may sound, this is NOT about renewing America by making and buying more “stuff.” This blog post accompanies the delivery of the RAP essay entitled “Renewing American Vigor: Transforming Consumption and Production.” After two months of promising this essay and drafting many versions, we decided to just post the draft as it is today, knowing we’ll never get it “perfect.”

The essay is several times longer than our typical blog posts, but it took a few more words to report on how production and consumption have led to the state of the American Promise today. Our intent is to demonstrate how transforming the production and consumption of “stuff” is at the heart of what we can do as individuals to regenerate and renew American vigor and potential to more broadly fulfill the American Promise.

The American ideal of possessing “stuff” has roots in the influence John Locke had on George Mason and Thomas Jefferson in their respective writings of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence. [1] We noted this in a post that introduced what we called a Platform for RAP (called FAPITCA at the time).

Our essay on production and consumption in America shares these roots. We’ve also sought to expand the discussion to talk about sustainability of the American Promise and way of life through smarter production and ownership of property and ideas in light of what’s possible today. We address consumption, production and “ownership” of ideas as additional items of “stuff” we sometimes tend to hold on to all too long.

The essay traces an important part of the story of how Americans think about the acquisition and possession of “stuff” (again, where “stuff” means both physical and intellectual possessions). We go back and cite previous work in this area by Betty and Mike Sproule, and Annie Leonard, as we’ve previously written about in “…and our Posterity…”. Their work introduces important driving forces that have led to the challenges we have with production and consumption in America. The essay also introduces the role of marketing and investing in the world of American consumption.

Since this blog is about America in the Connected Age, we devote a good deal of the essay to how we might harness the tools of information technology to transform consumption and production. As we note in the essay, the “problem is that we have been unable to see the forest of opportunity in a new age of connectivity because all we can see are the trees that compose our individual relationships to the present and the future.” We make the case for the imperative of leveraging information technologies available to us today.

Additionally, we revisit one of our very favorite authors in American history and culture, John D. MacDonald, creator of the well-known “Travis McGee” series of novels. It turns out that the ol’ beach bum Travis and his sidekick, Meyer, had a lot of insight about America today even though they talked about an America of 40-50 years ago. [2]

Finally, we wrap up the current version of the essay with a review of some highly pertinent insights from our friends Wayne Porter and Puck Mykleby, the authors of A National Strategic Narrative. We’ve written about Wayne and Puck’s work in several previous posts, but in the essay we try to tie some of their relevant thoughts to the ideas of transformed consumption in America. Thanks to Wayne, Puck and Betty Sproule for making the Narrative so accessible!

Note that we call this the “current version of the essay.” This simply means that we understand an undertaking like the essay can only be a draft in the Connected Age. Our networked world changes quickly and an essay about production and consumption in America needs to maintain some level of fluidity, as well. This also means that we intend for our readers to help us maintain this essay through their comments and edits. We mean this…please help us make this essay better!

We hope you find value in the time you might invest in “Renewing American Vigor: Transforming Consumption and Production.”

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 9/4/2014/.

Notes:

[1] As noted in the essay, George Mason even had designs on transforming American consumption back in September, 1787, while the Constitutional Convention was wrapping up the final drafts of the Constitution.

[2] Contemporary mystery and adventure fiction readers who enjoy novels by Carl Hiaasen and Lee Child (“Jack Reacher”) will appreciate their respective Forewords in the last two re-releases of the “Travis McGee” series.

Thomas Paine: IT Legend of the 70s (1770s, that is)

by Carl W. Hunt

In the 21^st Century, we “moderns” tend to view technology, and most specifically information technology, as both the harbinger and the facilitator of a revolution in life. Search companies help us find information immediately, hardware companies deliver incredibly fast processing and presentation capabilities and software companies find ways to make information easy to store, access and manipulate. The revolution in information technology has been astounding!

What hasn’t been so astounding or particularly revolutionary is what this information really says and how it touches us as Americans who are still part of a great revolutionary experiment started 238 years ago. Apart from the scientific insights that modern IT has packaged and presented to a more widespread audience, and the promise of revolutions in medicine, transportation and robotics, where are the great ideas about social change? And I don’t mean Facebook or Google+!

The ideas and concepts that have been pushed around through modern IT haven’t been nearly as revolutionary as those of one Englishman who did as much as any Founding Father to set America on an enduring and revolutionary course of its own. [i] Of course, this revolutionary master of IT in the days of the Founders is Thomas Paine. [ii]

Thomas Paine in his role as an early information technologist and yes, revolutionary, is a merger that we need today more than ever. America and its “revolution” in IT could use someone who could think about America’s future and articulate those ideas in ways that haven’t been before: that was a hallmark of Thomas Paine.

Common Sense: We Still Need It!

Source Data Below.

Perhaps where we’ve erred the most in recent years in establishing and maintaining good governance in America is by letting it get too complex, too big and too convoluted. In Common Sense, Paine wrote “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” If we revisited and even “rewrote” Common Sense today, that principle of simplicity would endure, even in a nation of over 318 million.

But, we would still have government lest anarchy prevail, a point that Paine also made. Government is more than a necessary evil, as Paine wrote about the British government (and government in general), and we would do well to follow his “common sense” advice about how we move forward with our own government today.

Paine originally wrote that representatives of the people to the government should be direct representatives, thereby giving the electorate more say in those that governed them. In a nation closing in on 320 million people, that won’t work as well today as it might have in 1776, but that’s where “common sense” IT could come into play.

Back in April, Chuck and I wrote about Harnessing the Tools of Collaboration. Our nation has made dramatic progress in pioneering and implementing collaborative IT tools that have started to change government for the better.

Unfortunately, these tools haven’t changed politics for the better. Government, as an abstract entity outside politics, is poised to harness the tools of collaboration. Politics harnesses the tools to seek gain for the party’s objectives and enhance reelection potential. In America, the government and politics coevolve and today, politics have been the dominant force. I think Thomas Paine would say that’s just not “common sense.”

It’s way past time to go back and reread Paine and the Founders to see how Common Sense guided the formation of our nation and made it possible to get through our very rough first century and endure through this century.

What’s Holding Common Sense Back Today?

Perhaps the single greatest inhibition to a return to “Common Sense” in government today is a stark lack of courage. Our laws in 2014 are a hodge-podge of patches that sometimes don’t even reflect the original problems they were meant to address: Tax, Transportation and Immigration laws being three of the worst collections of such “fixes”. Our elected leaders, mostly in Congress, refuse to address fundamental rewrites of these laws that reflect 2014 rather than 1914 (1814?) for fear of electoral backlash…gutless only begins to describe these “leaders” who somehow keep getting reelected! [iii] Add to that a tendency to bring more people into government to write, interpret and enforce these patchwork laws, and government gets even more complex. There’s no “common sense” here!

Another inhibition to a return to “common sense” approaches to government is a media that’s divided even more than our Congress, pandering to intellectual and geographic divides in an “arms race” to be more popular or sell more ads than their competitors. Okay, this is the American way, but without some level of “common sense” applied to the media, the American Way may disappear into islands of disconnectedness and lack of concern for a national entity that made the freedom of the press possible in the first place. Come on, media…get your act together and use some “common sense” to promote America rather than tear it down!

Source Data Below.

From a material standpoint, our systems of production and consumption have ceased to follow any recognizable pattern of “common sense” as well. Chuck and I already beat on this idea in past blog posts and the FAPITCA Platform, so there are only a couple of pointers in this post: here and here. But, Thomas Paine noted an interesting contrast about society and government that applies, writing that “Society is produced by our wants” (the essence of our production and consumption of both goods and ideas) with government serving as a constraint by “restraining our vices.” [iv] This indicates that government does in fact have some (at least a limited) role in moderating production and consumption so that the wants of society do not destroy all the resources that could be consumed in meeting those wants. That’s just “common sense” too!

If these appeals to look at America in the light of Thomas Paine as a revolutionary IT legend make sense, we’re way behind the power curve and we need to rebuild some “common sense” into American government now! To make these changes, and include a modernization of Common Sense, it’s worth going back and revisiting a blog post I wrote in April called A Narrative for our Nation and our Promise. The authors of the National Strategic Narrative provide some deep insights on how to move forward…these guys got it right and best of all, they used “Common Sense.” I think Thomas Paine would agree.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 8/22/2014.

[i] Chuck and I wrote a bit about Thomas Paine as an influential thinker of the American Revolution who appreciated the sacrifices and commitment of the Continental Congress in 1776, contrasting it to what he might think about today’s Congress. Unfortunately, Congress’s contributions to the American people have only been on the decline since we wrote that post in February.

[ii] Speaking of mastery of the IT of the time, Paine’s Common Sense sold over 500,000 copies in 1776, still the largest selling book in proportion to the population in American history, which was estimated at 2.5 million at the time. That’s some legendary IT there!

[iii] Obviously, President Obama did address Health Care in his first term, but neglected to embrace the input of the opposition party. This shortcoming has only been exacerbated by the political divide that makes it almost impossible to address the shortcomings in a sensible…”common sense”…fashion.

[iv] The actual quote from Common Sense, in context is: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” Paine went on to write that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil” but it is necessary in any event. A key premise of FAPITCA has been that government is necessary, but it does need to be done right, and in recent years it has not been done right. Also, remember that Thomas Paine was a revolutionary who successfully raised the issues but did not accomplish much at all when he was placed in positions of authority to fix the problems he identified (including government positions in England, France and of course, America)! As America has often been able to do, we must find and leverage the strengths of our people, in the right ways at the right time.

Image Sources:

Common Sense: Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commonsense.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Commonsense.jpg

Lewes, UK Tavern Sign: “White Hart Paine plaque” by Sussexonian. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_Hart_Paine_plaque.jpg#mediaviewer/File:White_Hart_Paine_plaque.jpg. This commemoration of Thomas Paine is particularly significant in that Paine lived and developed many of his original ideas while living in Lewes, Sussex Country, UK, working for the local government…Lewes, DE, named for its UK sibling, is the author’s home.

The Cost of Balkanization

By Dr. Lawrence Kuznar, Ph.D., Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne

The last FAPITCA Platform post on Public Service was particularly poignant, given current events in American politics and the tragic inability of Iraq to stem the advance of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham).

Iraq is a nation of approximately 32 million people, with an active army of over 270,000 and reserves of over half a million. As of this point, it is being overrun by ISIS, a force barely 1/10^th, and probably much less, its size. Furthermore, the vast majority of Iraqis oppose ISIS on secular and religious grounds, and in utter fear at the horrific acts this group is committing.

These acts include forced conversion, genocide, mass killing, torture, crucifixion, and the kidnapping, rape and forced marriage of hundreds of women. There can be no doubt that no matter what faction of Iraqi society one belongs to (except a tiny minority of Islamic radicals of the most extreme kind), defeat at the hands of ISIS means utter loss and humiliation, if not outright death and destruction.

Yet, the response of the Iraqi government is political infighting, markedly demonstrated by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s initial refusal to step down as the Iraqi government announces his successor.

The tribalism and balkanization of Iraqi politics is stunning, considering the ruin virtually all Iraqis will suffer because of it. For the sake of personal interest, Iraqi politicians actually are undermining their own interests and sealing their constituents’ fates. They failed to find Benjamin Franklin’s wisdom about disinterested politics as Carl and Chuck noted last week.

The situation should appear surreal to most outside observers, but the seeds of such destructive self-interest are easy to find, even here at home.

In light of the dire situation in Iraq, US politicians were eager to mount the airwaves, in part to condemn the horrific actions of ISIS, but first and foremost to condemn our President. It is one thing to dispute the wisdom of the President’s foreign policy, but their arguments were peppered with needless ad hominem attacks designed to denigrate the President and foment division in our political system. Alas, where is the loyal opposition?

Perhaps the most publicized example came from Representative Peter King (R – NY), who referred to the President as “weak,” and accused him of a “shameful abdication of American leadership.” [1] Wasn’t this the same president who gave the order to take a significant risk on getting bin Laden? How could he be seen as weak and abdicating leadership shamefully?

If Representative King’s statements were an isolated incident of a politician understandably frustrated and horrified by events that could threaten our security, it could be forgiven. However, this is typical of the balkanizing rhetoric that stands for political “debate” in our system today. Only days before, Republicans initiated a lawsuit against the President due to their disagreements over the Affordable Care Act, while others clamored for the President’s impeachment.

Moreover, the rhetoric employed by pundits that support the extreme opposition have no qualms about labeling the President a “tyrant,” “lawless,” or “Gestapo.” [2] In an especially egregious lapse this year, Representative Jim Bridenstine (R – OK) merely demurred when a constituent suggested President Obama was an “enemy-combatant” who “should be executed.” [3]

This level of rhetoric is dangerous. Words matter. Successful extremists begin their campaigns by increasingly demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. [4] This is something different than opposing others’ views: this is about robbing opponents of their humanity, rendering them expendable, morally bereft and unworthy of existence.

John Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” – 1690. Source: Wikipedia

We should all be reminded that, while our nation was founded on the principle of competing self-interest, it was supposed to be an enlightened self-interest, balancing myopic self-interest with the realization that we are all on the same team and need one another to realize our interests…this goes back to John Locke and his influence on the British form of government that inspired our own. [5] The Iraqi government has utterly failed to appreciate this principle, and I fear Americans are losing that faith as well.

While I think that American political trends could in fact foreshadow an Iraq-like balkanization, I have a more practical and immediate concern to address. ISIS is clearly gaining ground, and if current US airstrikes and support of the Kurdish Peshmerga are not enough to defeat ISIS, ISIS will, as they have stated, strike at the West. Recently, ISIS spokesman Nidal Nuseiri stated that they have a systematic plan that includes attacking the American homeland before even attacking their hated Israel. [6]

As Americans, we have to ask ourselves: will we have set aside our differences and be united enough as a nation to prevent an ISIS attack? And if we are attacked, what will be our response? Will we devolve into an orgy of finger pointing and blame, allowing our real enemies to take liberty with, and from, us? These are the questions our citizens, our pundits and our public servants must take up now. Please try to think like Americans while you address these questions!

Originally posted by Carl Hunt, on behalf of Dr. Lawrence Kuznar, on 8/14/2014.

Editors Note: The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of the primary authors of this Blog (Carl and Chuck Hunt), but we deeply appreciate the candor and perspectives of Dr. Kuznar as an honored guest blogger with FAPITCA. Thanks for your willingness to call it like you see it, Larry!

Notes:

[1]  Meet the Press Transcript – August 10, 2014 , “Meet The Press” — Sunday, August 10, 2014 hosted by David Gregory

[2]  Obeidallah, Dean, The Right’s Dangerous Rhetoric: Obama as an ‘Enemy Combatant’, The Daily Beast.com, 2/10.2014.

[3]  According to the cited Daily Beast article, “This statement was made to Republican Congressman Jim Bridenstine at a recent town hall meeting.  What’s even more disturbing was Bridenstine’s response to this outrageous remark. He didn’t object to it. Instead, he simply laughed and then told the person: ‘Look, everybody knows the lawlessness of this president. He picks and chooses which laws he’s going to enforce or not enforce. He does it by decree…’”

[4]  Trommler, Frank (1992) “Between Normality and Resistance: Catastrophic Gradualism in Nazi Germany,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, Supplement: Resistance Against the Third Reich., pp. S82-S101; Thompson, Allen, ed. (2007) The Media and the Rwandan Genocide. London: Pluto Press.

[5] Locke, J., Second Treatise on Government, 1690.

[6] Halevi, D. and Soffer, A., ISIS Spokesman Explains Why ‘Islamic State’ Not Supporting Hamas, Israeli National News.com, 7/10/2014.

Rethinking the American Narrative

by Chuck Hunt [1]

For some time, I have been questioning when the American narrative actually began. From reading the popular histories today, it seems we are fixated on the late 1700s, when our foundational documents and institutions begin to emerge. The period leading up to July of 1776 seems a popular date.

This question resurfaced recently when I started reflecting on the differences between Americans and Europeans. After having spent over five years in Europe, mostly in France, representing the people of the United States, I began to appreciate the differences between the outlooks of Europeans and Americans. The optimism and the “can do” orientation of many Americans I knew stood in contrast to the pragmatism, realism and at times cynicism of many Europeans.

These experiences led me to question how the American narrative diverged from European perspectives and cultures. Many Americans today are descended from Europeans who arrived here on the shores of America hundreds of years ago bringing with them European belief systems and values. How did we so quickly (in European terms) transform from “subjects” of monarchs to citizens seeking self-governance and freedom that comes with independence?

I believe the answer to this question is that the American Narrative only has a portion of its roots in Europe, as well as Africa and Asia. At the root of the American Narrative is a story of the coevolution of many different influences from throughout the world, including those who lived here when the Europeans first arrived.

American Indians were here long before the Europeans – they were the original American sources of influence on the Europeans. Whether we were cognizant of it or not, from the earliest days of Western colonization American Indians shaped our narrative. When we consider the basic structure of our government and its founding documents, the way we would come to wage war, the way we nourished ourselves, or even our quest for freedom, it’s very likely that American Indians played a fundamental, even original role in shaping what has become the American Narrative. [2]

Sadly, due to a variety of forces ranging from ignorance to arrogance to racism, we seemed to have systematically minimized these influences. There are times in our history when we even demonized the contributions of our native peoples, forcibly taking their land and driving their cultures into near-obscurity.

My self-questions suggested that it is perhaps time we go back and begin to celebrate these influences as distinctly American…perhaps we would benefit today from embracing our American Indian history. In others words, maybe it’s time we start thinking of our American Narrative as beginning to emerge thousands of years ago. We might even consider deleting the word “Indian” in the previous sentence and declare that we should “embrace our American history.”

I use the word “embrace” instead of pride in the foregoing paragraph because it’s a mixture of things in which we can take pride, but also honestly acknowledges where we have fallen short of embracing values so eloquently expressed in core documents from the revolutionary era and beyond. Notice I didn’t use the term “founding documents” because perhaps we should revisit the notion of “the founding.” Perhaps some of the initial founding concepts began to emerge well before Europeans even arrived in what would become America.

Just as we likely embraced wisdom based on thousands of years of reflection by native peoples as we designed our government, maybe it is time we do likewise in figuring out how to come back together as a nation and create a more sustainable future for each other that our native forbearers envisioned.

Recently, I had the honor of visiting the leadership of the Onondaga Nation in New York [3]. I had an epiphany as I sat in their rustic but elegant longhouse. As I listened to their leaders, Sid Hill and Oren Lyons, among others, it hit me that they were sharing with me wisdom gained from perhaps thousands of years of experience and reflection. I was there as a representative of a government that was only 238 years old and it struck me that we have much to learn from these people who have lived in this part of the world far longer than my nation and even European nations have existed. My Native American hosts spoke with a passion for peace and protecting the environment that was so thoughtful and sincere that it transcended any of the childlike politics that currently plague mainstream America.

For example, Oren Lyons introduced me to the concept of “One spoon, one dish.” At the risk of butchering his wisdom, I perceived he meant that we all have one spoon, but we share the bowl (earth) and we are to take just what we need and keep it clean. It’s a simple way to acknowledge concern for your fellow being, conservation of what nature has given us, and avoidance of greed. Oren Lyons also stressed the importance of making decisions based on the welfare of the next seven generations. Wouldn’t the current generations of young Americans like to know that Boomers were thinking like that when they started having children?

Unquestionably, some of what was shared with me would be labeled by some of our edge-driven countrymen as socialistic or environmental extremism. I would urge them to stop applying 20^th Century philosophical concepts to profound, centuries-old ways of thinking. What could be more authentically American than the voice of this tribal leader based on the teachings of people living in this land well before any Europeans arrived?

This recent experience in New York leads me to start thinking about an American Narrative that embraces thousands of years of wisdom. I’m ready to proudly embrace the roots of our nation’s heritage and give credit where it is due. Most importantly, just as we did a couple of hundred years ago, we need to listen to our native, indigenous wisdom to chart a revised course for our nation to get out of this poisonous political cul-de-sac in which we find ourselves and start taking better care of each other and our environment.

For your own inspiration (and perhaps epiphany), watch this short video of Oren Lyons explaining his awakening concerning the environment and wisdom passed on to him by his uncle:

Originally posted by Chuck Hunt, 7/26/2014.

Notes:

[1] We’re taking a brief departure from the FAPITCA Platform series to post this special piece on the “American Narrative,” a topic that will be incorporated from time-to-time in future posts. This proposal about rethinking our nation’s narrative is not precisely related to the National Strategic Narrative we’ve discussed in previous posts, but may have a bearing on that work as well.

[2] For a visual background on America before the mass arrival of Europeans, see Native America before European Colonization.

[3] The Onondaga Nation is a member of the Haudenosaunee (“People of the Long House”), an alliance of native nations united for hundreds of years by traditions, beliefs and cultural values. Also referred to as the Iroquois confederacy or Six Nations, the Haudenosaunee consist of the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga Nations and Tuscarora Nations.

The Platform, Part V, Section A: How Higher Ed Fails the American Promise

Editor’s Note: This post is part of the FAPITCA Platform series entitled: Sustain and Advance American Culture, Science and Education. Dr. Kuznar provides us a distinctive perspective on education in America.

By Dr. Lawrence Kuznar, Ph.D., Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne [1]

Higher education is central for Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. This essay is one insider’s perspective on how higher education fails to deliver that promise to our next generation, and what can be done to correct this failure. [2]

The core of the problem is that higher education has become a system for issuing credentials (degrees), and not one that transfers the skills our next generation requires to serve themselves and our society in a globalized, interconnected world.

Consider three dimensions of the problem:

• Our upcoming generation needs to acquire a set of useful thinking skills from universities
• Our universities claim to confer these skills
• Universities actually provide something else

The system fails due to specific actions by faculty, administrators and students, and therefore integrated changes in their actions can solve the problem.

Desired Thinking Skills

Here’s the bottom line objective: Today’s college graduates need to be employed to be productive, and the skills employers desire are consistent with academic ideals that are applicable to both the world of work and responsible citizenship. This involves knowing how to think and how to learn (and keep learning and thinking)!

A couple of recent surveys (National Association of Colleges and Employers, Chronicle of Higher Education) [3] provide results consistent with other research on the skills employers want and need, and what graduates often lack. Some of the most important skills employers note lacking in college grads, and that would be most valuable in the modern workplace, include: verbal and written expression, time management, problem solving and decision-making.

What Universities Claim to Produce

Academics consistently insist a baccalaureate degree signifies that a graduate has acquired the time-honored skills of expression, critical thinking and love of learning. This is true for an elite research institution such as Harvard [4], and for a State-sponsored institution such as Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne, which serves typical middle Americans. [5] Yet, employers of recent graduates claim that these skills are lacking across the board. Something is wrong.

What Universities Really Confer

If students are not acquiring the skills that academics claim they teach, then what do students get from their universities? The answer is simple: a credential, the baccalaureate degree.  Universities are more systems that confer symbols in the form of diplomas, and less like institutions that educate the next generation.

The Problem: Why Don’t Students Learn?

Universities fail to educate and prepare the next generation to lead our society because education has become a tertiary objective at best. Arum and Roska’s 2011 Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses is an honest and sound analysis of higher education’s failings. They administered a widely accepted test of expression and critical thinking to thousands of college students across the spectrum of higher education institutions. They found that students demonstrated only marginal gains in these skills since high school, and those gains were directly proportionate to the amount of time students spent reading and writing for their class requirements.

The problem is not that students are lazy. They spend a lot of time socializing, working and even serving their communities. What they do not do is spend much time studying because educators do not require much reading and much writing on behalf their students.

Arum and Roska keenly point out that over the past several decades, an agreement has tacitly emerged between faculty and students: “Don’t bother me and I won’t challenge you.” Students responded as consummately rational actors, allocating their time efficiently to gain their credential, the degree, with the least effort possible. We have incentivized students to earn credentials, and de-incentivized them to learn.

Why don’t my colleagues and I require students to read, process and think? It is because that would be valuable time taken away from our research, our ever-increasing administrative duties, and other academic activities. There is a triumvirate involved in this systemic failure. Administrators focus on creating new programs and increasing graduation rates, faculty concentrate on research accomplishment, and students efficiently gain the benefit we taught them to value, the degree.

In the end, everyone gets what they want (or think they “want”), but the students are robbed of a genuine education and our society is robbed of an upcoming generation prepared to meet the challenges of a new, interconnected and globalized world. We rob our future of the thinkers our nation so desperately needs!

The Solution

The solution is daunting, especially given how administrative, faculty and student goals interact to create an agenda that subverts the real educational mission…this substituted agenda has taken on a life of its own. [6]

Businesses in our modern economy demand smart, creative, communicative and sound-thinking employees and this should be used as incentive for positive change. To help things change, employers need to emphasize credentials less, and value evidence of thinking and the ability to express oneself effectively more in potential and desired employees. This could be fed back into the cycle through more active support of effective universities on the part of employers.

There is some progress. Some employers are starting to scrutinize the whole applicant and some universities are helping students develop portfolios as a means of demonstrating their skills. However, we need a tighter focus, and real education.

The successful Berlin model [7] that required educators to be current in their fields by engaging in active research has metastasized, practically turning many of our universities into for-profit research institutes. Teaching at these institutions is often denigrated, and graduate students are socialized to avoid and dislike the classroom.

In order to avoid this distraction and refocus the system on education:

• Faculty and administration must balance the emphasis between research, teaching and service in meaningful ways when evaluating faculty for tenure, promotion, and compensation.
• Time spent productively challenging and interacting with students should be rewarded and not punished. If so, I am pretty sure many of us would focus more time on challenging students and not merely mollifying them.
• Graduation rates should not dominate the metrics used to calculate state and federal support.
• Instead of using graduation rates, the teaching component in state and federal funding formulae needs to measure actual learning and intellectual development, not credentialing. An educated public can prevail upon legislators to change those formulae.

As for the students in this new focus on education, they just need to be themselves. Our next generations have always risen to a challenge, and they continue to do so today: that’s an American legacy that still works! Unfortunately, the older among us have forgotten that legacy and have stopped truly challenging our young learners in productive ways.

The problems with our higher education system genuinely threaten our ability to sustain the American Promise. If we fail to recalibrate our higher education system toward learning and away from symbolic credentialing, then we fail to provide our next generation with the tools they need in a modern, globally interconnected world…the Connected Age. Ironically, these are timeless tools the ancient Greek founders designed and intended for higher education to deliver 2500 years ago. It’s time to get back to applying their wisdom to the future of America!

Originally posted by Carl Hunt, on behalf of Dr. Lawrence Kuznar, on 7/9/2014.

NOTES:

[1] Mariah Yager kindly produced graphics for this essay.

[2] I am a career university professor. I attended a large state institution for my undergraduate degree where I witnessed the shift from learning to credentialing, and then attended an elite research institution for my graduate work where I was socialized to focus entirely on research and to denigrate teaching. I have spent the past 24 years as a professor at an institution that primarily serves working class, first generation college students. The views I express are mine alone and do not reflect any official position of my university.

[3] National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2014, Job Outlook Survey https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/skills-employers-value-in-new-hires.aspx?land-surv-lp-3-prsrel-07042014; The Role of Higher Education in Career Development: Employer Perceptions https://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf.

[4] “To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought” http://www.harvard.edu/faqs/mission-statement.

[5] “IPFW values… a strong general education program and baccalaureate framework that emphasize critical thinking, promote lifelong learning” http://www.ipfw.edu/about/strategic-plan/mission-values-vision.html.

[6] While I am focusing on education, it is important to note that universities also have equally important research and service missions that cannot be ignored in any solution. While none of these missions can be neglected, education has been de-emphasized and thus fallen behind.

[7] Anderson, Robert (March 2010). “The ‘Idea of a University’ today”. History & Policy. United Kingdom: History & Policy. Retrieved 20 June 2014.

The Platform, Part IV – Environment and Infrastructure, Section B

(Note: as this piece is being posted on July 4, 2014, we pause to think about the bravery of the Founders who took on the responsibility to launch the United States of America in 1776 and truly hope their courage will inspire those who now hold the future of our great nation in their hands.)

Rethinking Ecosystems

In Section A of this post on Environment and Infrastructure as a part of the FAPITCA Platform, we used the word “ecosystem” a bit loosely. We did this in an effort to create a metaphorical visualization of how the environment and the infrastructure coexist and coevolve with each other in America (and indeed in all civilizations).

In reality, the environment nature provides is really its own ecosystem (or family of ecosystems), as is the infrastructure we build to support our way of life. Our friend, Harold Morowitz, pointed out that “life itself is a property of an ecosystem rather than simply biochemical interactions,” – that principle is important. Harold writes that “no species is an ecosystem itself, and a fuller treatment would include coevolution, the evolution of all species in an ecosystem, as well as the symbiosis in all its forms.” [1]

In this sense, the American way of life has emerged as a property of the interaction of our magnificent environment and the infrastructure we build to support our economy and access to opportunity to partake in that economy. The two coevolve to produce the America in which we live.

We just wanted to push forward the conversation about how the environment and the infrastructure can better interact to provide a basis for enhancing the opportunities we must discover and exploit in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. We can control to a large extent the effect the infrastructure has on the environment and we can find more effective ways to protect the environment: this is what we search for in defining a possible “ecosystem” that might exist between the two.

Our argument is that in order for us to find a meaningful ecosystem that includes all ways of political thinking (even including the edges of each political party), it’s important to think in terms of ecosystems and balance. Understanding the role of our interacting environment and infrastructure as an ecosystem is a way forward to success (or more accurately rediscovering inclusiveness and progress) in America.

To expand on this, let’s return to our previous discussion of human habitat and how recent history has impacted it.

Building on our National History

Jan Hauser, guest contributor from Part A, points out that “creating good habitat requires collective and integrated action. Today, there appears to be little political support for ‘collective action’ and integration (and even less financial support), and the term ‘collective action’ has almost taken on a negative connotation.” This is tragic, Jan adds, posing a not-too rhetorical question of “how do you think we got a Constitution, a Declaration of Independence or triumphed in World War II if not for collective action and thinking about how all of the parts will work together?” [2]

Speaking of World War II, possibly some of the best urban human habitat can be found in pre-World War II neighborhoods. They are characterized by sidewalks, parks, functional front porches, places of worship, public transportation, and often, just enough commercial activity (restaurants, taverns and grocery stores) that one can take care of most regular needs on foot – people can walk, not drive, to tend to their affairs! And, in walking they’ll likely meet and talk face-to-face (and even share ideas!).

These environments weren’t created by each person doing their own thing. They were the result of many people working together to create community: business people, city planners, real estate developers, architects, transportation planners, recreation advocates, and others concerned about life in America.

Another example of different views of habitat can be found in transportation planning. If you get the chance, drive Interstate 10 from East Texas into Louisiana. If you have in the recent past, think about the contrasts.

In Texas, almost every major highway is ringed by “feeder” roads. These feeder roads almost always become choked with commercial activity: fast food restaurants, gas stations, four-wheeler dealers, truck stops…you name it. Unfortunately, these feeder roads make driving in Texas much less pleasant than it could be as the scenery of right-of-way is often an unsightly mishmash of development. More importantly, there is constant traffic coming on and off the interstate to access these businesses. [3]

Compare that experience with Louisiana. As soon as you enter Louisiana, you notice that the scenery is more prominent and that “civilization” is far less developed. You also notice less traffic weaving in and off the highway. Your driving experience becomes more relaxed and feels safer. The big difference is the lack of feeder roads. Yes, it took collective action to build these feeder roads in Texas, but let’s question the motivation and effectiveness of that activity. Apart from making room for another four-wheeler dealer, what did that feeder road really provide?

Hey, what’s wrong with taking a little collective action to improve human habitat? Somehow, that makes all too many politicians nervous and they lose focus on people in contrast to commerce and tax bases. When we want to improve habitat with parks and community areas, all too often we hear from our elected officials, “Oh, we can’t afford that!” or “That’s a frill the budget doesn’t support.” Strangely, there’s always room for another McDonald’s or car dealership!

Rather than just having to deal with anxiety, obesity and depression, why can’t we address our habitat needs as humans who want to live in the most free and lovely place on earth? Why don’t we enhance our habitats with parks, sidewalks, calmer (and safer) roads or just a little more open space? That would allow us to better blend our environment and infrastructure.

If we are going to have a better, stronger nation, we’re going to have to think about our infrastructure and environment in a more integrated fashion including their relationship to our quality of life. We’re going to have to relook how we live together with nature, our environment and the infrastructure we build.

Empowering the Synergy

We think that a key to advancing the way we best exploit the work Americans put into protecting the environment and building on our infrastructure investment is to transform how people see this interdependent relationship. Policy makers must encourage people in all parts of the political spectrum to value achieving a balance and synergistic relationship between the two. This balance would give us:

• Healthy habitats in which to live. Here we should seek to build harmony between our habitats and our ways of life where these habitats bridge between environment and infrastructure in complementary ways. This might be accomplished through creating more realistic expectations about what American life is, both in terms of responsible wealth and stuff accumulation, as well as stewardship of that wealth for future generations. We might create these expectations through a range of approaches that start with responsible parenting and early education all the way through the protection of the environment and infrastructure as national security priorities.
• Freedom from political exploitation of the environment and infrastructure. We need to quit making the environment a political issue so that the parts that make up this critical sustaining ecosystem for people and other living things may thrive in balance. As a nation we simply have to respond to the urgency to find balance in our political systems and throughout all levels of American community. Political exploitation of the both the environment and our infrastructure has become so pervasive that we may just have to find ways to minimize the damage the older generations do and try to hold on to a core the younger generations can inherit and rebuild. Many of the people who compose our current political system seem to have transcended the ability to preserve our future or even to think about our nation’s future.
• Access to a thriving economy and the opportunity needed to sustain our economy. Equal access to opportunity is critical since we need some reasonable level of wealth to support our lives and investments in our environment and infrastructure…everyone should be able to invest in this ecosystem. This blog was founded on the idea of creating access to opportunity as a principle for Fulfilling the American Promise. Again, we may just have to wait until the older generations pass on the mantle before any real progress in this area can be made. The Founders of America and the Framers of our Constitution must be rolling over in their graves at the sclerosis we call Congress today.
• Better future world for our children through education and access to opportunity. This may seem to be a repeat, but it’s worth repeating so that the quest for balance in the ecosystem is a more natural and logical pursuit. This has also been a common refrain in this Blog. More than anything else we hope to achieve through FAPITCA, it is the hope that our older generations now “in charge” will stop blocking the future progress of America and invest in our future generations through affordable, quality education and the creation of new ways to ensure access to opportunity for young Americans. We must get past our biases about social standing, race, gender and other distractions to focus on making America a sustainable place for all who would contribute to our future. Anything less than that is a betrayal of what our Founders left us to preserve.

It’s simple as an idea, if not in execution: We must stop treating the ecosystem of our environment and infrastructure as a “political, partisan” issue…the sustainment of our world and the American way of life is just too important for that.

There is nothing ground breaking in arguing for a more integrated approach to preserve our way of life in America. Objective students of history might argue that American Indians, based on thousands of years of reflection, have shared similar philosophies for a long time: what we build must synergize with what nature gives us…Nature owes us nothing! In his work, Chuck had a recent contact with the Onondaga Nation in New York that only reinforces this conviction. We would be well served to consider their insights. (Perhaps we will write more on this in the near future.)

Next time, we move on to the fourth plank of FAPITCA, “Sustain and Advance American Culture, Science and Education,” leading off with a guest post by a professional educator and great friend. Stay tuned for our penultimate plank in the FAPTICA Platform!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 7/4/2014.

NOTES

[1] Morowitz, H., The Emergence of Everything, Oxford Press, New York, 2002. Harold’s explanation says a lot in a few words. While we don’t go into the coevolution of environment and infrastructure in this post, if our readers recall our earlier discussions of coevolution and emergence (here and here), we introduced the idea of different players in a system (federalists and anti-federalists in the examples we used) as coevolving with each other to produce emergent behaviors, again citing Harold’s work. This same principle is at play here, as the environment and infrastructure coevolve to produce the physical setting for our life in America. Harold’s insights about the components of an ecosystem are a close parallel as this physical setting is fundamental to life and the opportunity to maximize life in America.

[2] Jan Hauser is a pioneer of developing and applying science and technology to business, social and environmental problems. He was formerly a principal (technology) architect at Sun Microsystems and a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Jan is also responsible for Sun Microsystems joining The Santa Fe Institute and has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution on “Complexity and Gaia” a topic closely related to this post. He periodically spends time working on the difficult and complex problems of “Global Sustainability” (see www.janhauser.com).

[3] San Antonio to Austin is now becoming one continuous urban entity. There is woefully little natural scenery between those two cities on I-35, and no attention paid to human habitat.

The Platform, Part IV – Environment and Infrastructure, Section A

Section A (again)[1]

How often do you hear “one thing leads to another” or it’s slightly cruder version “it’s just one damned thing after another!” That’s the way life seems: we just have to deal with one challenge or opportunity after another and hope our planning and preparation are sound enough to handle it.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not really the way life works today in the Connected Age. All too often, it’s really a bunch of “damned things” all happening at the same time!

Life in America is really about dealing with a lot of things that not only appear to happen at the same time, but also the many things that interact with each other. These interactions typically affect the outcomes of the other events that happen – some scientists call that complexity.

Whatever you call it, it makes anticipation and prediction pretty tough. That’s probably why Yogi Berra said that prediction is always tough, particularly when it’s about the future. Interaction of these “damned things” make it hard to understand what’s happening and what it means for the future. Nowhere is that truer than in trying to understand how people and ecosystems interact and what the consequences will be.

And, the modified “old adage” is really true when we try to understand how our environment and the infrastructure we’ve designed should work together. The intersection of the environment and our infrastructure in America is its own ecosystem. This merged ecosystem is perhaps the most potentially productive “system of systems” we have for progress in America: Mother Nature provides the one, and we provide the other.

Sustaining the Platform: Balance

This next topic in the FAPTICA platform deals with one of the richest and most difficult interactions we have to face in modern times: the interaction of our environment and our American infrastructure, as well as what it means to our quality of life and our future as a nation.

Just think about it: America is a complex ecosystem of diverse, interacting parts…it’s truly a lot of things all happening at the same time. An ecosystem works because it has interdependent parts that actually get along with each other well enough to produce growth and sustainment, even in the face of apparently simultaneous and self-serving actions.

Life works like that in culture, politics and families, too. As Americans, however, we’re failing more and more to get our “parts” working together enough to survive and grow. Good growth requires balance.

Throughout the FAPTICA effort, we’ve emphasized how important balance has been to our past successes as a nation and to our future. We need balance in our culture, society and political system…balance that helps to heal disconnects between our habitats, our societal dysfunctions and the environment in which we live on this world.

Ecosystems find this balance somehow or they perish. The ecosystem of environment and infrastructure sustain a working balance, or they would if we don’t ignore or abuse them. Today, the American ecosystem is losing its balance in so many ways that it’s getting harder and harder for us to find a common path to the future that all of our age groups can appreciate and in which they can find hope and mutual support. Protecting our environment and nurturing our infrastructure…keeping them in balance…builds that path to the future.

If you’re looking for a prime example of how our balance is off-kilter, think about what we call habitats, more specifically human habitats. This means where we live, raise our families, participate in our communities, find inspiration, and make a living. All of these things are part of our habitat.

As Americans we are squeaking by, some better than others, but the sad thing is that we probably know more about (or at least agree on) the habitat needs of white-tailed deer or horseshoe crabs than we do about human habitats. At this point in our American story, we seem to ignore our own habitat needs just as we ignore the environment and neglect our infrastructure.

Thinking a little more about human habitat, suppose you could “ask” a deer or any other living thing, (metaphorically speaking, of course) if living in an apartment surrounded by concrete on a busy highway is a good habitat. Apart from it being the only affordable place available, why we would we do this to ourselves? If deer could talk, surely they’d tell us “Don’t live like that – take better care of yourself, your family and the world that sustains us all!” If you forced a deer to live in that kind of hardscrabble setting, it would almost certainly suffer a premature death after experiencing significant dysfunction—stress, illness, malnutrition, etc. Oh wait – that’s what happens to people!

Unfortunately, humans often ignore their instincts and create and live in unfavorable habitats that fail to tap the promise of effectively synergizing our environment and infrastructure. Humans too can suffer a premature death after experiencing significant dysfunction—stress, illness, obesity, malnutrition, depression, chemical dependencies, family strife, crime…the list goes on. More and more it appears our habitats contribute to many of our leading societal ills, including political and societal woes.

Jan Hauser, a long-time consultant to FAPITCA notes “where we live, how we live, and what we demand creates situations of such complexity that any single set of rules will not suffice, and understanding what the key important factors are creates what is all too often a daunting problem.” Complexity scientists, such as previously quoted Harold Morowitz, might say “this is due to the complex and dynamical nature of various environmental factors and the complexity of adaptive bio-systems,” Jan points out. We’ll return in the future to this concept of a multiple “set of rules” since it also addresses the idea of sustainability and access to opportunity.[2]

Jan also adds that “much lip service has been given to ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable communities,’ but often times when we take a closer look, we find “greenwashing” or improvised models which omit or obscure important shortfalls.” Such shortfalls, Jan says “are usually a product of good human intentions, but are often incorrect due to a natural tendency for our typical thought patterns to unwittingly have many misrepresentations, omissions, and errors.”

Bottom line: the interaction of our environment and our infrastructure sustain the American society and our failure to recognize this and make good long-term decisions to correct our shortfalls practically ensure we will lose balance in America. We’ll also talk more about contemporary ideas on decision-making as a function of maintaining balance and creating opportunity in the near future.

As with many problems we identify and propose as “critical” in FAPITCA, this challenge of balancing the protection of the environment with the need to generate and sustain infrastructure creates tough, tough narratives to understand yet alone resolve. In our next installment of this two-part post on “The Platform, Part IV – Environment and Infrastructure,” we’ll begin to look at how our recent history offers insights into approaching ways to leverage and protect the synergies we seek between environment and infrastructure in America. Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 6/27/2014.

Notes:

[1] Yes, this is another 2-parter! Several of the FAPITCA Platform proposals exceed the commonly accepted length of blog post of around 1000 words (okay, 800-1000 words! Of course, we routinely bust that limit…sorry!). Since we’ve been successful in getting some outside expertise in some of these pieces, we want to ensure we take the space necessary to express relevant and diverse thinking. In this piece, we welcome Carl’s friend Jan Hauser. Jan has been a long-time advocate for looking at the environment and infrastructure in a synergistic light. His background is in the footnote below.

[2] Jan Hauser is a pioneer of developing and applying science and technology to business, social and environmental problems. He was formerly a principal (technology) architect at Sun Microsystems and a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Jan is also responsible for Sun Microsystems joining The Santa Fe Institute and has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution on “Complexity and Gaia” a topic closely related to this post. He periodically spends time working on the difficult and complex problems of “Global Sustainability” (see www.janhauser.com). Editor’s Note: speaking of the Naval Postgraduate School, these ideas about environment and infrastructure also reflect inspiration from the National Strategic Narrative, quoted previously in FAPITCA posts.

The Platform, Part III: Transforming Consumption, Section A

Consumption and Production: A Model

Life in the Connected Age can be as simple or as complex as we want it to be. Fulfilling our Needs and Wants in today’s super-connected world almost ensures complexity and the emergence of unforeseen consequences. This complexity guarantees we “discover” sources of “stuff” we don’t really need or want, but for some reason keep buying…that’s a potential challenge for America that we want to examine in our Platform.

The odds are good that we actually contribute to making our lives more complex and even confusing in our quest to satisfy desires for more stuff. Even though our brains probably use the same thinking mechanisms to satisfy Needs or Wants, neuroscience indicates that using one thinking process to deal with the two distinct issues of both Needs and Wants leads us to acquire a lot of “stuff” we don’t actually require to live happily.

We may subconsciously get confused about what’s really a “Need” and what’s really just a “Want” or even extraneous. This causes additional challenges for the economy, the environment and access to opportunity. Our intuition about acquiring stuff influences us in ways we don’t always realize and stuff kind of sneaks into our lives before we know it, whether the stuff has real value to us or not.

This passion for more stuff, whether a Need or a Want, affects a lot more than our overstuffed closets and garages that no can longer hold cars. Consumption of goods and services directly affects Production, Marketing and even Investment in companies that serve our Consumption zeal. All four processes are deeply interconnected and as we claimed at the closing of the last post, also affect our economy, our government systems and by extension, access to opportunity.

At a very high-level, we’ll look at the interactive, interdependent nature of Consumption, Production, Marketing and Investment in this post and start to see how this affects our individual and collective ability to Fulfill the American Promise in the Connected Age. This high-level examination begins with a very simple model:

High-level model suggesting relationships of key components related to “Acquiring Stuff” within the American capitalist-based economy.

The simple “Stuff Acquisition” model above suggests these four processes and their relationship. Note the unidirectional nature of the arrows and the ultimate target for Investment, Production and Marketing: Consumption (better known as the “Consumer”). Production and Marketing share both a direct and indirect relationship and often influence each other.

Note also what the objectives of these three processes are in targeting Consumption: Acquiring Stuff! The two broad categories of Wants that we acquire are planned and impulse, where impulse acquisition is most aggravated by the Connected Age technologies we mention below. This is also the one area that we could favorably impact on behalf of our nation if we can only harness these same connecting technologies to become more enlightened Consumers. We’ll discuss that below and in Section B.

It really doesn’t matter to the Producers and Marketers (and all too often, the Investors) whether the stuff is a Need or a Want, as long as we Consumers acquire it. After all, that’s how capitalism works and that’s fine as long as we realize our role as Consumers in this model and how the choices we make affect America. We need to understand that we (all Americans) are the central focus of this Consumption process and be smarter about the role we play.

Thoughts about Consumption Today

There’s a lot of research about why we acquire stuff in our lives, but we’ll only talk about a couple of simple explanations in this post. In their 2012 book, The Stuff Cure, Betty and Mike Sproule propose several ways to simplify life and live happily in less clutter. The book examines ways to make our lives less of a burden to ourselves and to others. It suggests how we put sustainable economic growth at risk. The Sproule book reveals how far we’ve drifted from simple, elegant and productive lifestyles that are as much about our families, communities and our nation as they are about our individual selves.

The Sproules suggest that we likely “attribute meaning to obsolete objects,” and we acquire so much stuff because these things reflect “the story of our lives. Material objects conjure up feelings that, together, constitute our humanity. When looked at, or thought about, the items that we keep enable us to clarify what our experiences of living add up to.” Bottom line: our stuff tends to tell our story and that’s something hard to give up.

For the past seven years or so, Annie Leonard, creator of The Story of Stuff, has been a chief proponent of satisfying the competing interests of our need to have stuff and our need to protect our environment. As we mentioned previously, her online movies help us visualize both problems and solutions related to acquisition of the things we feel compelled to acquire and consume. Her stories tell us a great deal about the relationships of Consumption and Production.

In large part, we have become a nation of Producers, Marketers and Consumers because that’s what great nations do: they make stuff, they sell it and they use it. As we mentioned above, and subtly demonstrated in the graphic of our model, Investment also plays a role because success in capitalism tends to attract more investment.

This model, while essentially valid in any economy, has enjoyed almost no meaningful refinement in the Connected Age, except to enhance Production and Consumption. Search engines help us find stuff more quickly, including “serendipitous discovery” which leads to acquitting more stuff! Companies like Amazon know how to exploit this to the max!

But here’s the key for FAPITCA: how we think about and ask questions concerning new ways to build, consume and market the things we need and want are critical to the way our nation’s future will unfold. Will we be a smart global leader that uses resources, including technologies like search engines and online markets, wisely and efficiently or will we consume everything in sight as we practically have since the blending of the Industrial Age and the Connected Age in America?

We’ve built for ourselves an almost never-ending loop where producers deliver goods and services in anticipation of being able to sell practically anything to someone as long as it can be marketed effectively enough to gain some attention somewhere. Niche products abound and are more easily discoverable through Connected Age technologies. Technologies like “3-D Printing” will make it even simpler to satisfy wants in the near future (and produce more stuff!).

Producers drive markets as much as Consumers do, building stuff consumers never knew they “needed” before they saw it in a store, online or on TV. It doesn’t matter how useful the stuff is as long as Marketers can create a craving or demand so that someone will buy the stuff. This Production-Marketing-Consumption “loop” is a magnet for Investors who are looking for someplace to make more money.

In Section B of this post on Transforming Consumption, we’ll look more closely at how we define and create value in the Production-Consumption model as well as the real-life contributions we can make as smarter consumers to Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 6/6/2014.

 

The Platform – Part II: Ensuring Opportunity

A major premise of Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age has been about opportunity in our nation. In fact, it’s the first point of definition of the American Promise in the Principles of FAPITCA: “our people have freedom of access to an equal opportunity to succeed (or to fail).” Freedom is at the root of this definition, and both success and failure are possible outcomes. America’s brand of capitalism has never been promoted as a guarantee for “success.”

Source: Wikipedia

To make capitalism work at maximum efficiency, however, government and commerce need to interact with each other to ensure equal access to opportunity. The roots of this are acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, as Thomas Jefferson channeled the likes of John Locke and George Mason proclaiming in our Declaration our unalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

 

VA Declaration of Rights Virginiamemory.com

Locke and Mason both wrote about “life, liberty and property” [1] or “…life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property…” [2] During the era of the authorship of these documents, Locke, Mason and Jefferson considered the pursuit of happiness to mean both personal “ownership” (freedom) and the property one could acquire.

We posited in our outline for the FAPITCA Platform that in effect our Declaration provides a foundation for equal access to “a baseline income that provides a foundation to support the ‘pursuit of happiness’ and that this baseline income should offset practical living expenses while making it possible to pay reasonable taxes and to loosen ties to government support.” Whether this is manifested in a higher minimum wage or a renewal of support for businesses and governments to work together to create more and better opportunities for our nation’s unemployed is a topic to be discussed in more depth than within this blog.

In any event, the creation and sustainment of access to opportunity to obtain ownership of property (personal and tangible) certainly appears to have been the intent of the Founding Fathers! [3]

A major issue we face in the political quagmire of Congress and all too many statehouses today is how to visualize ways to create opportunity and get our economy back on track…ways that don’t smack of “socialism” or “welfare state” politics. It is a tough problem, but it’s not as intractable as it seems.

America has been at these very challenging “inflection points” before and we found ways to overcome them. In fact, in Dead Men Ruling, C. Eugene Steuerle argues that America has faced at least two of these kinds of crises we face today: in the post-Revolution when America faced the choice of amending the Articles of Confederation and writing a new American Constitution; and “at the start of the Progressive Era, when the nation’s leaders began to add the governmental structures that proved necessary for an emerging world power.” [4]

In both instances, our elected leadership (granting that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were in fact elected) found ways to compromise and push forward in the interests of the nation and the American people. They saw the future of America and worked together to address the challenges they knew they would face: they visualized and compromised. This ability to visualize and compromise has not been successfully applied in our politically-driven world lately, even though we have some of the best Connected Age technologies we could ever hope for! We have the tools that our forefathers could only dream of and yet our Congress won’t use them…very sad.

One of Steuerle’s key points is that our previous era’s leaders found ways to work together and considered the challenges we faced in the post-Revolution and the start of the Progressive era as opportunities for the nation rather than threats to their political careers. “Because elected officials who acted would often pay the ultimate political price at election time, they were often reluctant to act, and delays in achieving fundamental reform imposed additional burdens on the public. Not surprisingly, the current turning point requires much the same focus and presents the same political threats and theatre to the elected officials of our time,” Steuerle notes.

But our leaders in the past found the courage to compromise and act to set America up for success rather than the failure upon which our political leaders of today seem bound to engage. Disregarding Locke, Mason and Jefferson, our current crop of edge-driven representatives in both houses want to choke back opportunity for fear of looking too liberal, too progressive and too inclusive of the younger generations. They seem to be more concerned about reelection in spite of the opportunities this current situation offers – their courage and leadership are lacking. Their current approach fails to recognize the successes we found in opportunities like Steuerle cites.

All that said, there are a few straightforward proposals in which we could start using our Connected Age technologies to visualize and even predict how well we could move forward in this time of great opportunity. We could start using the technologies described in past FAPITCA blog posts to model and observe the interactions of people, tools and policies to project a future environment for success that matches the outcomes about which Steuerle writes. More importantly, if we are objective enough, we could use these technologies to create compelling, unemotional arguments for experimentation and possible adoption. Good ideas only go so far; we also need action and effective execution of ideas and plans. That’s another good use for visualization!

Below are several proposals that we might consider as part of our interaction experiment. Using the modeling technologies we’ve discussed elsewhere (here and here), we could build integrative models that visually demonstrate how one proposal interacts with another, or even all of them. By integrative models, we mean modeling in a fashion that highlights synergy between the elements of the models that shows dependencies in context, not attempts to cherry-pick pet projects – we have to see how all of these things work together to avoid the “unintended consequences” of one change here and another change there. We need to show holistic impacts.

We don’t claim that any of the following are original to us, and they certainly haven’t been “scored by the Congressional Budget Office,” but they are a viable starting point. We present these proposals as the basis for generating good hypotheses and experimentation; call them thought experiments at this point.

Some of the initial things to model include:

– A proposal that we lift the cap on Social Security contribution limits from its present limit of $117,000, while lowering the contribution rate from 7% to 5%. This will be a “tax increase” for people whose earnings are in excess of about $163,800, but a “tax cut” for all other workers. [5] Indirect compensation like corporate benefits and perks could also be subject to this 5% contribution on the personal income side. Self-employed would pay a flat 10% and all would continue to contribute 1.45% to Medicare. We call this first proposal sparing a nickel for Social Security.

– Increasing the minimum wage to a pay scale that rewards work more than not working. Whether $10 an hour or $15 an hour is appropriate, these rates of pay can be easily modeled in an integrated fashion as we’ve been discussing. The bottom line is that the level of income must be sufficient to empower living in a safe home that supports raising a family and pumps more money back into the economy. The scale of payback to the economy from many more folks who could then live fuller lives that achieve the American Promise will be much greater than the money a few wealthy Americans would “pump” into the economy. Scale is on our side here and we must use it.

The first two proposals could actually be combined in legislation as part of what we might call the 2014 “Rewarding Work in America Act.” Using the modeling techniques we referenced above and just applying basic economic principles, it should be straightforward to show that these first two proposals will put more money in the pockets of lower and middle income working people, boost the economy and address several of the income inequality issues that appear to be worsening. We must reward work, which means we must get people back to work so that they can earn a living wage and create their own positive impact for the economy!

– Eliminating tax breaks that ONLY benefit the wealthy, such as eliminating all mortgage interest and tax deductions for second homes. It no longer makes sense to provide these kinds of tax breaks to people wealthy enough to own second homes—or a boat because it happens to have plumbing aboard. The “return on investment” for these kinds of deductions is ineffective in an economy that’s changed as much as ours has in the Connected Age. If we must add deductions that stimulate the economy, let’s find deductions that benefit everyone.

– Making a meaningful contribution to our young people by:

   — Eliminating ALL interest on student loans if paid back in a finite period (say five-ten years)

   — Exerting downward pressure on tuition by providing a cap of no more than $50,000 as eligible for the “interest-free” provision

   — Encouraging state universities through a variety of means to embrace a “two-and-a half” rule which provides that no state university can charge more than two-and-a-half times the cost per student to that of the per-student costs of the state’s high schools. (The actual number would be subject to the modeling recommendations, but we hold that it should not cost states that much more to educate freshman and sophomores than seniors in high school.)

   — Offering more extensive and inclusive forms of public service such as AmeriCorps, Peace Corps and similar organizations that can both pay grant money for education and create invaluable work experience. We want to restore the value of public service to young people and our nation; these programs should be inspired by the contributions of the various forms of the GI-Bill that have positively impacted those who served in our nation’s military

   — Convening a national panel to explore what we can do to reengineer our colleges to stimulate lower tuition costs and deliver greater education value (it is inexcusable for the cost of a college education to exceed inflation costs so severely.)

– Reducing corporate taxes and at the same time encouraging and enforcing paying taxes on corporate income rather than “protecting” that income in foreign banks or holdings. American earnings belong in America as much as possible, to be invested into our own economy and infrastructure and most importantly, our people. Hiring Americans, paying taxes and supporting American research and development are some of the most patriotic things our businesses can support. America needs our businesses and companies to be part of the solution that saves and preserves our economy and environment—government cannot and should not do that alone.

Could these types of collaborative and interactive solutions serve to increase both opportunity and the tax base (without really increasing the rate of taxes paid)? That’s a sound and testable hypothesis anyway. These types of actions can provide win-win for both parties and it can be demonstrated through low-cost experimentation. In spite of this fact, neither party will talk seriously about these proposals, or if they do they talk about one, they exclude the others. All of these things, and probably others, are part of a system of success: the American Promise.

The refusal to compromise and do right for America is withholding equal access to opportunity. Far too many in America do not have access to Fulfilling the American Promise because too many of our leaders, and our electorate apparently, can’t see the opportunities and visualize how to achieve them. It seems they prefer to be frozen into stalemates and inactivity because of the challenges…that’s not the America most of us grew up to appreciate!

Increased access to opportunity presents us a remarkable path forward towards Fulfilling the American Promise – that’s why this is our first platform plank in FAPITCA. Unfortunately, how America (and most of the West) approaches production, consumption and marketing contribute to the cloudy visuals we suffer these days. We’ll talk about that next time.

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 5/29/2014.

NOTES:

[1] This was labeled as property in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, although it also referred to the concept of “estate”. See also Beeman, R., Our Lives, Our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor, Basic Books, NY, 2013, pp. 394-398.

[2] As written by George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights; this document was a significant source of inspiration to Jefferson and to many of the committee who drafted the Declaration of Independence.

[3] We do not address the national shame of slavery or dispossession of the American Indians from the lands on which they lived during this time, discussed very recently and in more detail in James Fallows’ blog post “The Civil War That Does Not End,” but the idea of “personal ownership” for all would surely have applied had America been founded in this day and age.

[4] Dead Men Ruling: How to Restore Fiscal Freedom and Rescue Our Future (Kindle Edition), The Century Foundation Press, Washington, DC, 2014.

[5] Employers would also save by paying a matching 5% instead of the current 7%, although their contribution could be phased out at some point, say $175,000 or $200,000, based on the findings of the models.

Chatting with a Small-Town Mayor

In the best of small-town politics, “Politics” really don’t even enter the picture all that much. In effective small-town government, elected leaders set their egos and personal ambitions aside and do what’s right for the community—solutions are for people and community first rather than for some political party. That’s the way it is in my hometown anyway…that’s the way it is in Lewes, Delaware.

To be sure, small-town governments are usually modest, on a scale with the population and needs of the residents. There actually is no need for a political party in this kind of government environment because elected officials know their community and the community usually knows their elected officials. Party politics would only add a barrier between the community and the elected leaders and add very little value, if any, to the community.

While there are small-town politics (small “p”) here in Lewes, they’re not the kind of Politics (big “P”) we find in Congress where people won’t even dare to cooperate with each other because of rigid political ideals. A lot of the success and freedom from party politics Lewes has enjoyed for the last decade, though, is because one man—the mayor—wouldn’t allow it. Fortunately, Lewes has also had a City Council that agrees with that perspective.

James L. Ford, III, known to most Lewes residents as Jim, served as the Mayor of Lewes 10 years before retiring this month. Prior to that, Jim served Lewes on the City Council for 12 years and five years on the Lewes Planning Commission. As is the case in many small towns, these positions are unpaid and offer opportunities to serve from the best of motivations: care and concern for one’s community. Jim stepped down at the “top of his game” as they say about sports figures, and judging from the turnout for “Mayor Jim Ford Appreciation Day” last weekend, almost everyone in Lewes will miss him.

Former Lewes Mayor Jim Ford (center) leads the “Zumba Break” with Kelly Serpico, Lewes Zumba and fitness guru (left) during “Mayor Jim Ford Appreciation Day, 5/18/2014, in Lewes, DE.

“Mayor Jim Ford Appreciation Day!” When’s the last time you’ve seen that kind of event in your hometown? Lewes is just that kind of community as most who visit here will confirm. Those who live here aren’t surprised in the least because that’s why they live here: that’s the sort of town Lewes is! That’s what good “little p” politics can achieve. “Little p” politics is about people, or as former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to quip “all politics is local.” Judging from the turnout at his “Appreciation Day,” Jim Ford got that right, along with most everything else a small town needs to thrive. Jim even showed he could lead a mass Zumba event!

Jim and I had lunch this week after his retirement and I asked him about a number of things that related to his experiences, but two important issues emerged that are relevant to Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age: overcoming barriers between political parties, people and good government; and transforming production and consumption in America, the topic of an essay Chuck and I are writing for the FAPTICA website.

Speaking of barriers to good governance, Jim emphasized a thought that I discussed in an earlier blog post that quoted Delaware Senator Chris Coons. Jim said the “biggest barrier now seems to be the party structure that is composed of so many factions, and the influence of lobbyists,” a point also made by Senator Coons. In debates that took place in Lewes City Council meetings “we always asked ‘what’s right for Lewes’” before taking votes and setting ordinances or policy. Jim and the Lewes City Council worked hard to eliminate barriers.

That’s missing in Congress these days, Jim pointed out, as debates seem more about preserving party ties and influence than about asking what’s best for America first. It should be about the nation first and the state or local community next long before considering lobbies or contributors, Jim agreed. Lewes succeeds, Jim said, “because we always had a balanced call for action” and Council activities were open and inclusive of the entire community. Jim and I agreed that it might be difficult to scale from local governmental effectiveness to national leadership, but we really need to examine what must happen to make that work.

Jim also had an interesting insight about the essay Chuck and I are doing on America taking the lead in transforming production and consumption. We want to preserve the great spirit of innovation and discovery the United States promotes, Jim said, but we do need to lead in developing “values-based consumption that is based less on marketing and more on personal values.” The idea of better incorporating personal values in the marketplace rather than relying on the production and marketing components of American commerce is a concept worth pursuing. We’ll explore that in our coming essay.

It was personally satisfying to break bread with Jim Ford and be the beneficiary of his great insights about governance at the local level and how important it is to keep searching for ways to scale good “little p politics” to good “Big P Politics” at the national level. After all, that is a major part of how we can move forward in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age!”

Originally posted by Carl Hunt, 5/25/2014.