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.

Platform Part V: Education, Science and Culture (Section B)

subtitle: Enough with the Boring Blog Post Titles, Eh?

Larry Kuznar’s post about the failings of higher education last week deserved a better title than we gave it. It was a brave and outstanding piece written by someone who knows how higher education works in the nation today. Larry’s post also opened the door to express more of our own perspectives.

Larry’s post was part of the series on a Platform for FAPITCA we “cleverly” called Building a Platform, Part I, in which we introduced an outline for five “Planks” that a more center-focused “political party” could use to inform how our nation moves away from fringe- and edge-driven politics. [1] Recent posts, while titled with boring but semi-descriptive phrases, are all part of this Platform; after today’s post, we’ll have only one plank left. [2]

Most importantly, we’re indebted to Larry for challenging us with his example to open up more and try to express our feelings about America with less equivocation. This means no longer blaming both sides of the political spectrum equally with softly uttered descriptions, although we will endeavor to maintain balance and represent the Center as an attractor to the disillusioned in the Edges. [3] America needs these people at the Edges to come back towards the Center, post-haste…please! [4]

First, here are a couple of thoughts about how Larry’s post fits into the Science, Culture and Education plank of the FAPITCA: America is greatest when we support the sciences (and the arts, hence culture). Education for our upcoming generations is the singular best way to build and strengthen our contributions to both our nation’s and the world’s science and arts. [5]

Each of the planks of the FAPITCA Platform is proposed as part of a whole. This whole benefits from linkages between the planks through rich interacting network connections that leverage the Connected Age in which we live. The planks can even compensate for each other when one is working less well than we might hope. [6]

As Larry noted, education and the resultant growth of science and culture (and arts) that ensues from education are deeply interacting pieces of the plank that deserve constant attention and investment to sustain our future as a nation. Education must evoke critical thinking and problem solving capabilities in order to grow America. They combine and even coevolve to provide the basis for our “national seed corn.”

It’s a mystery to us how our American system of education has not been more greatly valued and received more investment and encouragement. Instead, the various education factions line up against each other and rail about how the other side’s approach is so wrong. The various sides’ capacity, if it exists, to listen to each other and compromise with our nation’s interests in mind could surely produce a better working educational system if only they really wanted to and cared enough about America’s future.

It’s sad to note that too many in our political parties have forgotten whatever lessons they learned in school about compromise and collaboration. How much longer are the two parties and their supporting factions going to refuse to work together so we can stop eating our seed corn?

While both parties are at fault in the realm of agreement, the rise and influence of entities like the so-called “Tea Party” faction and its ilk have aggravated the failure of our national capacity to compromise and cooperate. These groups, even if well intended, must get down off their high-horses and start cooperating a bit more…with BOTH parties. They need to use the education they received in the American school system to help us move forward, not backwards! [7]

In the last few decades, America has been at the global forefront in scientific discovery and technological development (which leveraged those discoveries in science, by the way). We’ve also led in social and cultural activities that changed the world in many places and pushed forward the role of higher education across the nation and the world.

As Larry pointed out, education in America has experienced challenges to continuing that momentum of the past. We’ve lapsed in how many levels of education stack up with the rest of the world. But, this is America…we can fix that. If we don’t, science and culture will also lapse!

Our biggest challenge is that we have to collectively rediscover the will to succeed as a nation…we have to want to fix education. We have to embrace the need to invest in our ability to do good science. Americans must desire to collaborate and exploit our science into even better technologies, cleaner environment, enhanced infrastructures and other improvements in our way of life. Most importantly, we have to feel the love in doing all of this for our children and their children. We think Americans really do want to do these things…so let’s do it.

Now, if we can only find better titles for our blog posts! We want to and we will!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 7/16/2014.

NOTES:

[1] While we have been disparaging in our blog posts of the “Edge” and “Fringe” (the edge of the edge, as we like to label them) segments of American political parties throughout our posts, we do appreciate the paradox that they also apparently represent a source of real “out of the box” thinking about politics in this nation. In that regard, the Edges and Fringes might have a leg up on imagining new ways to govern and the rejection of the traps of excessive government and financial policy into which we’ve fallen as a nation through traditional politics. We strongly recommend the edges and fringes read Joseph Stiglitz’s recent book The Price of Inequality (or at least the essay of the same name at AlterNet) to better understand the effective role of government (as the Founders intended), rather than reject government outright.

[2] After this post and the final Plank post, we’ll finally post that essay on Transforming Consumption in America that expands on the second plank, again “cleverly” titled “Transform Production and Consumption.”

[3] So, some admissions: We are both moderately progressive, reformed semi-conservative types…sorry we can’t make a meaningful acronym out of that; perhaps we were really “radical moderates” as Elliot Richardson coined it in a book of the same name). One friend called Carl “socially progressive and fiscally conservative”…maybe that also works! The bottom line is that we’re not particularly happy with where the Edges of the Republican Party have taken our nation in the last decade or two, making issues of inane subjects that really should not affect how our nation moves forward in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. This is not to say that the Democratic Party is above the fray in promoting irrelevancy as well, but the Republican Party has not done well by America, perhaps even for the last 20 years. If only we could say the Democratic Party had done all that much better! As Adelson, Buffet and Gates wrote recently in Break the Immigration Impasse, “Americans deserve better than this” and “It’s time for 535 of America’s citizens to remember what they owe to the 318 million who employ them.”

[4] The bottom line here is that the Edges and Fringes (and apparently even the larger parties with which they are associated) could likely never come together sufficiently to champion opportunity for all Americans. At the rate we seem to be going, they probably could never be large enough to be a source of real change that enables maximum equal access to opportunity for all. Only the Center can act with enough mass and momentum to bring about that kind of change. A balanced Center that understands the importance of equal access to opportunity, and enforces it with their vote, will make the kind of difference America so desperately needs now.

[5] To ensure we can sustain such growth, we also commented on the need for protecting our environment and infrastructure…that one plank is tied to the success of all of the rest.

[6] The interacting principles of FAPITCA can also be viewed as a complex system that creates maximum resiliency and opportunity if used to inspire new thinking about governance in America.

[7] See footnote 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 B

In the last post, we wrote about the challenges that today’s Consumption-Production-Marketing (and Investment) model present to us in creating a sustainable American economy and access to opportunity. We’ve repeated that model in the graphic below to help us refer to the processes and interrelationships of the processes.

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

In this post, we want to consider how we might start to transform these processes, particularly the one that every American can control: Consumption. We want to talk a bit about assessing and exploiting the information that this model generates and how we might use Connected Age technologies to create more value and an eventual solution-based approach to smarter consumption and production. Most importantly, we want to tie this model to creating greater access to opportunity to Fulfill the American Promise.

Value

Note that none of the data native to or generated by the loop in the above model offers any informational insight about the quality or value of the stuff produced or consumed (either goods or services). In our current economy, the pertinent information has to do with the financial gain that can accrue to the Producer, Marketer or Investor; while it’s true that money can also be a source of information, this is not the kind information flow that best depicts the American economy.

Today, the Consumer, who ultimately funds the cycle and is the ultimate source of return on investment, has the least input into the process in terms of identifying value or generating information. The Consumer, who should be on a level playing field in terms of information flow, could provide much more useful information for the entire system if we better harness the connecting technologies we have available to us today. Big Data analysis won’t be nearly as useful to knowledge generation about our economy if all it’s concerned with is tracking how much stuff Consumers buy!

The Consumer, who should be creating both the demand and the means of identifying value, actually has only a small role in this loop, other than to acquire stuff. In the graphic above, note how the solid arrows point one way. Apart from tracking what stuff consumers buy, where is the information flow on behalf of the Consumer?

This loop affects how the American Promise might be fulfilled in a big way! New technologies and the resulting gadgets we can buy because of new inventions and innovations have subtly changed the way we look at opportunity and value in America. We’ve forgotten the interdependent responsibilities of buying and selling, the basis of a value-creating capitalistic culture. We’ve become ill-informed Consumers of goods and services in this great nation, and it’s past time we transformed that part of American life.

That’s right: both Producers and Consumers have a complementary responsibility to help drive the cycle of Production, Marketing and Consumption (and thus effectively influence Investment). The model today is Production and Marketing driving Consumption, whereas the market should really be Consumption driving Production (and Marketing as needed in the case of value creation that has not yet been adequately promoted). Investment will chase after either model as long as the information flows are there.

Consumers must influence Producers to make and deliver sustainable goods and services that account for long-term value, not the whims of today’s hottest craze. This was also a lesson that former City of Lewes, DE Mayor Jim Ford imparted in a recent post.

Solutions?

So, what do we do to bring about more value-driven Consumer behaviors? How do we make our stuff tell a better story about our lives as individuals, communities and as a nation committed to a long-term, sustainable economic future?

One way to begin Consumer behavior change is to start using the transformational power of our information technology to inform ourselves about what has happened to the United States in the last 40-50 years as far as politics and budgets are concerned. We need to overcome the political influence that some have sought to leverage in distorting the use of IT to separate us from each other. The gulf that edge-driven politics has created using IT today also inhibits bringing about a sustainable economy through generation of maximum opportunity to participate in that economy.

Fixing these kinds of problems requires individual responsibility and even an individual change in the way we Consume and Produce goods and services in the United States and abroad. Producing, selling and buying simply to make money can no longer be the primary rationale for the American Connected Age form of capitalism.

Production and Consumption requires more intelligence than that in a globally Connected Age. We need to harness IT innovation and change our political infrastructure to leverage these new opportunities to succeed as a people – we need to create better access to opportunity for all to participate in these new economies. Buying and selling and making money is inherent to capitalism and is great as long as Producers deliver real value and not just bottom lines. It’s even greater if everyone has an equal shot at participating in the opportunities we create as a nation.

Perhaps the most important responsibility we need to take on as Americans is to transform ourselves away from the compulsion to acquire stuff. We all need to contribute to reassigning value to what America Produces and Consumes through the “Stuff Acquisition” model. This is how we ensure Producers produce good and meaningful stuff that helps us sustain a good environment and infrastructure that America needs to prosper. Consumers can and must drive this!

We are a connected people in this country and we need to start using that connectivity to become The United States once again. Our nation can once again reflect concern for our future generations by transforming the way we buy and use stuff. We can live up to the important and relevant responsibilities we’ve taken upon ourselves to lead the rest of the world in supporting societies that embrace freer and more open forms of government and care for the environment in which we all live together.

If there’s one place innovative thinking could be introduced with the prospect of good return on investment, it’s in the development of an adaptive model of American capitalism that embraces smarter Production, Investment, Marketing and Consumption. We welcome the discussion of what that model looks like as we move forward with FAPITCA! The graphic above is the “as-is” model but what we need is the “to-be” model, as engineers call them. Please join in this critical discussion to help our nation design this model!

Our next post in this series on Building a Platform will look at protecting and securing our environment and infrastructure, two deeply interconnected challenges for America which have a significant role to play in how we use, consume and ultimately dispose of our stuff!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 6/12/2014.

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.

Building a Platform, Part I

While we’ve been working on the essay, “Renewing American Vigor: Transforming Consumption in Public and Private Life,” it’s become apparent to us that we needed to permeate the essay with an ecological perspective. This perspective should demonstrate the holistic nature of good governance, similar to the way our Constitution does. It should also set up a dialogue about design and function of government in the Connected Age.

In other words, to approach Center-driven government and move away from the edges, we need a tool from today’s “political” campaign, in a manner of speaking. To compete in the current culture, we need a “platform,” as the political parties call them, that provides a foundation and a framework that empowers Americans to Fulfill the American Promise in the Connected Age. This platform should be simple, interconnected like an ecology, and easy to implement through the existing political process.

Our colleagues working on A National Strategic Narrative have a “storyline” to integrate their proposals for America…so we’ll borrow and adapt that approach to FAPITCA. This is evolution, not revolution. The platform will help us grow our narrative.

Today’s post lays out five initial categories or “planks” that would make up a platform on which the Center can design and build our nation’s future. The platform and its planks do not try to reach out to any particular political constituency, but rather seek to offer a workable, “good enough” approach to Fulfill the American Promise. Some of the planks may better appeal to conservative ideals while some may seem to lean more toward progressive principles. To be sure, we don’t propose this platform as our own approach to a “political movement” but rather to inform the evolution of existing platforms.

After all, America has room for more than one perspective; in fact, it requires more than one perspective to remain a diverse and resilient home for freedom, security and prosperity.

This hopefully impartial, neutral bias is by design since we generally view FAPITCA to support and balance socially progressive thinking with fiscally conservative restraint. We propose this balanced state all while positioning America to be a leader and inspiration to the rest of the world. We look to move forward as a nation while minimizing and mitigating the financial burdens we face today.

The platform builds on a couple of main themes: 1), Individuals at all levels have roles and Governments at all levels have roles: America can’t succeed otherwise; and 2), government, business and academia must all work together to open up and build opportunity for all Americans, individually and collectively. Underlying all of this is the fact that our Constitution guarantees to our citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and other important rights critical to the function of our freedoms – these must be preserved. All of this is fundamental to the platform.

In introductory form, the following broad categories compose our platform. These five categories are the planks upon which we’ll build in future posts, consistent with the Principles of FAPITCA. All of these planks are active in the American political environment at some level of maturity today, although some have not been referenced in the halls of Congress for a while.

1. Ensure Equal Access to Opportunity: The United States is a capitalist-based economy that is supported by democratically-elected servants of the electorate to oversee fair and open competition for access to opportunity and resources to succeed. This does not imply a guarantee of success in competition, but does guarantee all Americans will have access to the same basic entry points for fair and open competition at the beginning. This must include equal access to a baseline income that provides a foundation to support the “pursuit of happiness” as our Declaration of Independence proclaims. This baseline income should offset practical living expenses while making it possible to pay reasonable taxes and to loosen ties to government support. Individuals must all have a level playing field to enter, whether they take advantage of that playing field or not. This is the first definition of the American Promise: “our people have freedom of access to an equal opportunity to succeed (or to fail).”
2. Transform Production and Consumption: We must not leave our children the tab for all that we’ve produced, consumed and wasted. Covered in more detail in the aforementioned essay, this includes addressing how we value material and intellectual goods and services, how we produce and market these goods and services and how we consume and dispose of them. It also includes developing an understanding of the relationship between “values-based” production, marketing and consumption in the light of changing demographics and resource bases. This emphasis on the transformation of production and consumption is also at the heart of any new or modified “social contract” between America and its citizens. This plank addresses one of the Principles of FAPITCA: We are borrowing this land, culture and governance system from our progeny; what we pay back to them reflects on our legacy and lays the foundation for their legacy.
3. Protect and Secure our Environment and Infrastructure: America is a rich ecosystem of diverse, interacting parts. Humans are the stewards of this ecosystem although all too often we fail to exercise that responsibility. Two of the most important interacting parts of our ecosystem are our environment, provided by nature, and our national infrastructure, designed and built by all of us: both need care and foresight to continue to nurture and serve Americans. Both must coevolve with each other in ways that protect their distinctive contributions to America so that they help provide maximum security to our way of life and economy. By security, in addition to national defense, we also mean “freedom from anxiety” in the words of our colleague Captain Wayne Porter of the National Strategic Narrative project. Equally important, we must protect and secure our environment and infrastructure for our posterity as our Constitution’s Preamble demands in order “to promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty…”
4. Sustain and Advance American Culture, Science and Education: Three of the richest interacting components of America that offer the deepest impact upon our future way of life are our amazingly diverse culture, our contributions to science and our educational systems. Clearly, these distinct but highly interconnected areas go through ups and downs in terms of local, national and global contributions, but they are at the center of all that makes America so great. These three areas deserve constant attention and investment to sustain our future as a nation. Both our citizens and our governments at all levels must work together to build these elements on behalf of America and indeed the world. This is our “seed corn” and must be protected for all future generations.
5. Restore Recognition for Public Service: America is indeed a capitalist-based economy, but it thrives because for the most part, American governance works and acts effectively as a “silent-partner” to commerce and industry. After all, who else protects intellectual property, maintains law and order, provides national security, builds and maintains our infrastructure and educates future leaders and workers? Government and other forms of public service are critical components of this partnership. We must restore and both improve and streamline the services governments at all levels perform on behalf of Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. Most importantly, we must restore the image of government and public service as desirable training grounds and potential career pursuits. We should also consider ways to incorporate public service as a supporting and sustaining entry point into any career pursuit regardless of sector; we should find ways to use this initial service as an investment opportunity for education and employment training, much like the GI Bill did for many veterans of military service. Finding success in restoring the image of public service may be one of the best ways to assist our younger generations in both the near- and long-term as they search for new careers and find themselves as Americans. Those that do choose public service careers must understand and feel good about themselves in their service and their contributions to building and sustaining the American Promise.

We’ll explore more about each of these planks in future posts, seeking to refine them into actionable objectives that could inform future policy-making and elections in our nation. Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 5/23/2014.