Archive for the ‘emergent’ Category
The “Job Creator” Myth
Filed under: emergent | Tags: bottom up, economy, job creators, Republicans, top down
Leave a Comment Quick – which came first: economies or wealthy elites?
I raised this question because some politicians have developed a passion for referring to the wealthy as “job creators” – inferring that the well-being of the economy is tied to the well-being of the wealthy elite. The House Republican Caucus has a whole section of their website devoted to “job creators.” House Speaker John Boehner claimed last fall that “job creators are on strike.“ There’s even a group of business leaders who have established something called the Job Creators Alliance.
Since the middle of 2011, it has become almost impossible to find a Republican who will say that someone is rich. As Jon Stewart noted at the time: “Republicans are no longer allowed to say that people are rich. You have to refer to them as ‘job creator.’”
The question begging to be asked in all of this is whether the wealthy are, in reality, “job creators.” Based on a look at the facts involved – including both relevant statistics and insights provided from modern science – I believe the answer to that question is NO.
In an article about Boehner’s “job creators are on strike” claim, the website Crooks and Liars offers an array of numbers that don’t support his claim. They point out:
On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, “Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record.” (The Journal’s interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn’t merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton’s tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush’s job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:
The reason Republicans claim the rich are “job creators” is that they believe in “trickle down economics.” According to Investopedia:
Proponents of this theory believe that when government helps companies, they will produce more and thereby hire more people and raise salaries. The people, in turn, will have more money to spend in the economy.
Basically, if you let those at the top of the economic pyramid have more, the benefits will “trickle down” to everyone else.
This reflects a classic mechanical, “top down” view of how things work. In such a world, those at the top of an organization – be it economic, social or political – “operate” the machinery of the organization. They make the decisions and call the shots. Those below them in the hierarchy follow their orders.
If those on top operate the machinery properly, they reap the benefits; those who follow orders are compensated as those on top see fit. If they don’t operate things properly, then (in theory) the organization replaces the operators. It’s all very controlled and orderly – especially for those in control at the top. At least that’s the way it should be according to the believers.
Unfortunately, after 30 years of trickle down economics, it’s pretty clear things don’t work that way. How could we be in our current economic mess if they did? (Anyone blaming the current mess solely on Obama and the Democrats is just not looking at the facts. See the above chart, in which job growth from Reagan forward has yet to equal that of Carter.)
So why don’t they work? It’s because they’re based on an outdated world view. Republicans and conservatives have been looking at things from the traditional paradigm of Newtonian physics, which presented us with the “mechanical universe.” According to this paradigm, the best way to understand things is mechanically: an organization can be structured according to distinct tasks, each making a discrete contribution to the larger task of generating value, with everything managed according to classic command and control principles.
This view of management, which was the basis for mass production, was very successful for industrial production in the 19th and 20th centuries. And from this perspective, it might make sense to focus on those at the top who are “operating” the machinery.
However, some have begun to recognize that the mechanical universe is an illusion. As Dr. Brad Cox noted in a 2004 presentation titled “Command and (Out of) Control – The Military Implications of Complexity Theory“:
The Newtonian paradigm was so compelling, so neat, so logical – in short, so “right” – that it saw and imposed regularities where none existed. For the sake of finding solvable problems, science simplified reality by assuming an idealized world. It connected the discontinuities and linearized the nonlinearities – in short, it simply ignored all the countless inconsistencies and surprises that make the world – and war – such a complex and interesting problem.
The evidence is unmistakable: the Newtonian paradigm no longer satisfactorily describes most of our world (if it ever did). Science is slowly coming to recognize that the world is not remotely an orderly, linear place after all.
The same thing is true in economics. As Richard Wagner noted back in 2003, in an article in Financial Advisor:
Trouble is, our money words tend to ground in old models, particularly 17th Century physics and 19th Century biology. They have yet to incorporate the integral visions of 20th Century quantum physics or ecology. The result: “machines” vs. “ecosystems.” Not wrong, but not necessarily helpful. Often harmful. Mechanistic metaphors induce linear thinking that doesn’t accurately reflect 21st Century money. And money is hard enough without dysfunctional underpinnings. Unfortunately, inappropriate metaphors contribute to misunderstandings and questionable actions.
If we want to get beyond “inappropriate metaphors” that lead to “misunderstandings and questionable actions,” we need to face the facts. Trickle down economics doesn’t work, those at the top of the economic scale are not “job creators,” and making the rich richer will not make the economy stronger. But where does that leave us?
We need to get to the bottom of this – literally.
One of the basic principles of complexity theory is called emergence. According to this principle, complex systems – be they biological, military, economic, etc. – develop from the bottom up. As Dr. Cox explains in talking about military battles:
Evolution moves from the simple to the complex. Healthy complex systems evolve by chunking together healthy simpler systems. Attempts to design large, highly complex organizations from the top down rarely work, if ever. This merely confirms what successful military organizations have long recognized: success starts at the small-unit level. Build strong, adaptable squads and sections first. Train and equip them well – which includes giving them ample time to train themselves (i.e., to evolve). Give them the very best leaders. Give those leaders the freedom and responsibility to lead (i.e., let them act as independent agents). Then chunk the teams and squads together into increasingly larger units.
What this means is that if you want to improve the economy and create jobs, you need to focus on the simplest element in the economy: the individual consumer. If they feel economically secure and have sufficient funds, they will buy products, which will stimulate production, which will lead to the need for more workers. As venture capitalist Nick Hanauer blogged in his post “Raise Taxes on the Rich to Reward True Job Creators“:
…I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.
That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.
From the perspective of emergence, this is easy to understand. It’s not just “quantum sense” – it’s common sense.
Say you have some money and a passion for baking. So you decide to open a bakery. If your cakes and pastries are a hit with your customers, they will come back to buy more and tell their friends about your shop. The end result? With more and more customers you prosper – eventually to the point you need help and hire others.
But what if your customers don’t like your shop? What if they think your cakes and pastries taste bad or are over-priced? What if your shop is not convenient or they just don’t like you? It doesn’t matter how much money you have. Unless you make the right changes, your shop is never going to prosper. At the least, you won’t be hiring others to help you. More likely you’ll be firing any help you have and sooner or later you’ll go out of business.
And if you’re the richest person in town and hardly anybody else has money for cakes and pastries? The end result will be the same. Without enough customers, your shop is doomed.
The essential point here is that an economy is a complex emergent phenomena. It starts out as something small and simple; only as it grows does it become more complex.
The earliest economies really were small and simple. Unlike market economies or even barter economies, they were “gift economies,” in which people gave things to each other – often without an expectation for immediate or future compensation. As economic anthropologist David Graeber described it:
…what would really happen, and this is what anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor’s cow, you’d say, “wow, nice cow” and he’d say “you like it? Take it!” – and now you owe him one. Quite often people don’t even engage in exchange at all – if they were real Iroquois or other Native Americans, for example, all such things would probably be allocated by women’s councils.
As societies grew larger and more complex, their economies gradually evolved into what we now call a market economy. However, we still can find examples of gift economies in modern life. These include free software like Mozilla and websites such as Wikipedia. In a sense this also true of science itself, in which discoveries are shared with others who are then free to build on them. The main benefit received by those doing the sharing is an enhanced reputation – a kind of variation of Graeber’s “you owe him one.”
So, getting back to my original question: which came first: economies or wealthy elites? As emergence teaches us, the answer is “economies.” While more or less wealthy elites may develop in an economy over time, they are not the primary force behind that economy’s growth. Most importantly, they are not the “job creators.”
If we truly want to be effective in promoting economic growth and creating jobs, we should use what we learn from emergence. Let’s stop giving special favors to the rich and powerful, and let’s start focusing on the well-being of the real job creators – the middle class consumer.
Signs of the Times – 1/19/12
Filed under: dual nature, emergent, signs of the times | Tags: bottom up, failing institutions, government, individualism
Leave a Comment I often come across items that I believe reflect the changes I’m describing on this blog. To me they are “signs of the times.” Here are a couple.
“The Rise of the New Groupthink”
The New York Times recently ran an article about a paradox in the way we work today. For many organizations, there is an emphasis on the idea of collaboration. As author Susan Cain notes:
Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
However, she notes that there is a problem with this approach:
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
Later in the article she says:
…I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.
But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.
To me this is an example of a basic principle of the Quantum Age: contrary to the popular myth that we must choose between individualism and collectivism, we are inherently both individualistic and collective by nature. We often have a hard time grasping this because it’s impossible to see both qualities simultaneously. You can see a group or you can see a person in that group; you can’t see both at the same time. But just as subatomic particles have an intrinsic dual particle/wave nature, we humans have a dual individual/collective nature. We will only resolve many of our current problems when we recognize this fact and proceed accordingly, disposing of the prevalent mythology regarding individualism versus collectivism.
Country in Crisis: Looking to America’s Mayors to Rise to the Challenge
Arianna Huffington recently wrote an article regarding how America’s mayors are working to develop solutions to problems that seem to be stumping the politicians in Washington. As she notes:
We’re now in the midst of a battle to see who will sit atop the pyramid in official Washington. This battle will dominate the media in the year ahead, but what the last year showed is that the more important story is what’s happening outside Washington. It was a year in which Time declared “The Protester” its Person of the Year and “Occupy” was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. It was a year of solutions and energy and activism from the bottom up. And given that top-down thinking not only brought us a Depression-level crisis, but also shows no signs of getting us out of it, it’s bottom-up innovation that will be more relevant.
The rest of her article offers examples of such bottom-up innovation.
These examples demonstrate the power of emergence, the principle that living, self-organizing systems develop from the bottom up, within the context of their environment. As I’ve written here and here, many heads of institutions believe things are best run from the top down; that is a major reason why many of those institutions are in trouble. The solution will not be to accord more power and wealth to the heads of those institutions. The solution will be to recognize the power of emergence, and to learn how to rebuild our institutions in a way that harnesses that power.
Where Are The “Deciders”?
Filed under: emergent, interconnected | Tags: change, deciders, failing institutions, leaders, leadership, Penn State, Thomas Friedman
Leave a Comment In yesterday’s New York Times Thomas Friedman asked “Who’s The Decider?” He observes:
No leaders want to take hard decisions anymore, except when forced to. Everyone — even China’s leaders — seems more afraid of their own people than ever. One wonders whether the Internet, blogging, Twitter, texting and micro-blogging, as in China’s case, has made participatory democracy and autocracy so participatory, and leaders so finely attuned to every nuance of public opinion, that they find it hard to make any big decision that requires sacrifice. They have too many voices in their heads other than their own.
Friedman apparently believes that today’s leaders’ reluctance to make hard decisions is due to their “fear of their own people” – that they’re listening more to the opinions of others than to their own inner voices. The implication is that if these folks just mustered the courage to take a stand then everything would be better. He concludes:
Yes, it’s true that in the hyperconnected world, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, the people are more empowered and a lot more innovation and ideas will come from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s a good thing — in theory. But at the end of the day — whether you are a president, senator, mayor or on the steering committee of your local Occupy Wall Street — someone needs to meld those ideas into a vision of how to move forward, sculpt them into policies that can make a difference in peoples’ lives and then build a majority to deliver on them. Those are called leaders. Leaders shape polls. They don’t just read polls. And, today, across the globe and across all political systems, leaders are in dangerously short supply.
That all sounds great, and in a way kind of easy. “C’mon folks, just suck it up and decide!”
The only problem with Friedman’s argument is that it totally ignores another angle on today’s leaders: they actually are making lots of decisions – frequently with disastrous results. These decisions have resulted in the omnipresent stench of institutional failure that has permeated our world today – something I’ve already written about here and here. As Jeff Jarvis wrote recently:
We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.
While the leaders of these failing institutions may be concerned about what the common folk think, it’s not a matter of waiting to see what people want and then doing it. After all, most Americans want the rich to pay more taxes. So why are so many politicians resisting raising taxes on the rich?
Rather than tailoring their behaviors to accomplish what “their people” want, today’s leaders all too often focus on their own agendas and try to shield their decisions and objectives from the prying eyes of the public. When I first wrote about this, I mentioned the problems confronting institutions like Toyota and the Catholic Church. But we regularly get news of new cases of institutional cover-up of embarrassing and inexcusable behaviors. Right now the focus is on Penn State. Does anyone doubt we will soon learn of others?
Unlike Mr. Friedman, I don’t think today’s problems are stymied by leaders’ fear of making decisions. Rather, I think the problem today is that our world has changed profoundly; as a result, the rules for how things work have changed. However, most of our leaders are products of an earlier time, with different rules.
While we live in an interconnected world, our leaders are largely products of a culture rooted in individualism. As a result, while they may be aware of what the public thinks and wants, many of these leaders value their own interests and beliefs over the greater good. Meanwhile, those who are focused on the greater good are still stymied by the fact that they don’t know what the new rules are.
So what are we to do? We might start by recognizing that while we live in a brave new world, it’s not the first time humans have been confronted with profound change. Much of what we’re seeing today – some desperately clinging to the past while others flounder around looking for different options – is probably standard fare in such situations. Change is hard, and it takes time.
At first, nobody has the answers. But as time goes on and people become more familiar with their changed world, they begin asking the right questions and finding answers in sometimes unexpected places. They learn to adapt to change, and show others the way.
Some of those who most benefited from the way things were before would be the most resistant to change; this would include many leaders who find themselves confronted with today’s strange new world. In such a world, they would have the most to lose. But sooner or later they will be confronted with a choice: adapt or fail. That choice will be pressed upon them by others who have little to lose and much to gain under the new rules.
Contrary to what Friedman might think, leaders willing to confront today’s world are not in short supply. We just don’t know who many of them are right now; the world is still being run in many cases by members of the old guard. But they’re out there.
The growing impatience expressed with today’s leaders could be a sign that we will soon have a changing of the guard. Time will tell.
Bottom-up in Rio
Filed under: emergent, quanta | Tags: Brazil, change, empowerment, poverty, Rio, technology
Leave a Comment With events like the Arab Spring and OccupyWallStreet, it has almost become a cliche to talk about the empowering potential of technology. Such events have emerged largely thanks to our interconnected technology – most notably things like Facebook and Twitter.
The PBS NewsHour recently offered a segment about technology’s potential in Rio de Janeiro. There social entrepreneur Rodrigo Baggio has created the Center for the Democratization of Information Technology (CDI), which is focused on developing computer literacy and infrastructure in the slums of Rio. As Baggio says (through a translator):
Technology and technological inclusion allows for an impact that’s greater than just learning how to use a computer and being able to have access to the Internet. The big impact is that it empowers low-income communities because it teaches them to utilize technology to understand their reality in a better way and identify the challenges that they face.
He then discusses an example:
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Baggio’s favorite example is this video posted on YouTube by a group of young people.
RODRIGO BAGGIO (through translator): These kids went out with cell phones and digital cameras and they were interviewing community members and taking pictures in order to better understand their reality, the challenges that they face in the community. They chose an example of a photo of rats. One of the kids had taken a photo of rats.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: They traced the rat problem to garbage not properly disposed of or collected. Then they spread word through handmade and computer-generated fliers. They sent this video to the mayor, posted it on YouTube, and Baggio says all the publicity got a response from city hall that resulted in better trash services.
RODRIGO BAGGIO (through translator): I mean, this is a story, you know, 10 kids from a class that used technology, use the Internet to discover a problem, and find a solution for it and change their reality as a result.
This is a great example of the empowering potential of today’s technology; it shows how a social action can emerge using only computers, cell phones, the internet…and a little creativity.
There are those who view power as a top-down phenomena; they argue that the way to improve things is to cater to the rich and powerful and then count on the benefits to “trickle down.” As this case illustrates, those familiar with the power of technology and social media are likely to respond that such views are increasingly out of date in today’s world.
OccupyWallStreet and Failing Institutions
Filed under: emergent, interconnected | Tags: change, failing institutions, future, linked world, Occupy Wall Street, Wall St
Leave a Comment Jeff Jarvis has written about the OccupyWallStreet movement:
#OccupyWallStreet, to me, is about institutional failure. And so it is appropriate that #OccupyWallStreet itself is not run as an institution.
We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.
He goes on to say:
What’s happening is an attempt to define a new public, now that we can. Iceland, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are all countries being reimagined and remade: start-up nations. Hear Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir talk about building a new constitution, using Facebook, on the principles of “equality, transparency, accountability, and honesty” — liberté, égalité, fraternité, updated for the networked age.
In the end, this is why I wrote Public Parts, because we have the tools and thus the opportunity to rethink and reorganize our publics and decide what they stand for. The power and freedom that Gutenberg’s press brought to the early modern era, our networked tools now bring everyone in this, the early digital age. “They empower us. They grant us the ability to create, to connect, to organize, and to aggregate our knowledge…. They lower borders, even challenging our notion of nations.” That’s what the youth of these countries are doing.
I agree with the observation that many of our institutions are failing in important ways. However, I think this failure is symptomatic of larger changes happening in our world. It’s not a matter of intent – the leaders of these institutions aren’t trying to be evil. Rather it’s a reflection of the fact that those in charge are products of a different era and mindset, which is incapable of understanding and adapting to our changed world. As I have written before:
…many institutions are failing because they haven’t adapted to the ways our world has changed. One thing that’s striking about many of the big institutions finding themselves in hot water these days is that a big part of their problem appears rooted in a mistaken belief that they are able to tightly manage/control the information about problematic issues. Toyota had problems with car defects; it tried to hide them. The Church had problems with perverted priests; it tried to hide them. Goldman Sachs had problems with very risky investments and very shady dealings to get rid of them; it tried to hide them. Tiger Woods had a thing for cocktail waitresses; he tried to hide it.
In an earlier, less connected time, perhaps these things wouldn’t have become such big deals. Probably past experience in hiding problems had led the leaders of these institutions to try a similar approach in these cases.
However, they apparently didn’t realize that in today’s hyper-connected world it’s almost inevitable that bad things will come to light – whether it’s vehicle flaws, priests behaving badly, devious investment strategies, or adulterous affairs. And now when the news DOES come out, the impact is likely to be much greater than it might have been before the Internet and global communications – especially if it’s apparent there was a cover-up involved.
As I noted last year, the end result for all of these failing institutions will depend on their ability to adapt to our changed world:
I think this time is like any other in which great change has taken place. Some people and institutions will adapt to change and thrive; others will fail to adapt and fall by the wayside, deserted by their former supporters and clients.
Some may loudly protest the change and uncertainty of today’s world. They may even gain enough influence to hamper some institutions’ ability to adapt to these changes. But they can’t stop the change itself. In attempting to turn back the clock and to resurrect an illusory past they will be much like a bunch of Americans in the Panama Canal Zone back in 1964: all they are likely to accomplish is a quicker demise of the institutions they had hoped to preserve.
I’ve never been a believer in the so-called “Wisdom of the Market” as the term applied to Wall Street. But I do believe in the idea as it applies to transformational times and ideas. When the times are changing, the ones who understand and adapt to those changes will be the ones who thrive in what comes.
In the end we will be left with a combination of old institutions that adapted and new institutions that saw a better way and followed it. Everything else will just be history.
Government By The People
Filed under: emergent, interconnected | Tags: Amazon.com, government, internet, linked world
Leave a Comment Modern technology has empowered us in many ways.
With a computer or smart phone I can (among other things) keep in touch with friends, share photos, check the weather, compare prices on just about anything, find out which products or vendors are good or bad, contribute to websites like Wikipedia, create and give or sell items, and express my thoughts on a blog.
Smart businesses have recognized this trend and tapped into it. Amazon.com lets you comment on any product they sell and even get a commission when you refer people to their site. eBay lets you set up your own virtual store. TV news and sportscasts create polls to gauge your opinion and offer opportunities to show off your photo of the latest news or weather event. Apple invites you to share playlists of your favorite tunes for their iTunes store. Everyone seems interested in what you want and what you think, and looks for ways to put you in the driver’s seat.
Everyone, that is, except for politicians.
When it comes to our government, politicians all too often seem more interested in doing what they want to do, in spite of what we voters think. And what politicians seem most interested in doing is catering to the wealthy and powerful who will reciprocate by helping them stay in office.
This is starting to piss people off.
We heard a lot in the last election about how angry Americans have become these days. The Tea Party got a lot of press about their anti-Democratic Party focus, but the anger really goes deeper. Frank Rich recently suggested that the cause of Americans’ anger today is:
“…the realization that both parties are bought off by special interests who game the system and stack it against the rest of us.”
This is true. But I think that anger and frustration is deepened further by the context of our times. When many other parts of our personal lives have become more responsive to our thoughts and needs, why does our government still seem so unresponsive? And how can we make government as responsive as a successful online store like Amazon.com?
This isn’t just a matter of Washington politics and big issues like bailing out Wall Street or health care reform. It also applies to minor local things like getting a pot hole fixed. If I have problems with an order on Amazon.com, I can usually get it fixed in short order. Why does it take government so much longer?
There are a number of reasons for this, including a lack of imagination and accountability by many of the people in charge and a lack of resources to create new technology-based systems that would increase efficiency. Sadly, another key reason is that the current system actually IS responsive to those who really matter: the politicians and their financial masters. If the head of Goldman-Sachs is bothered by a pothole on his street, what do you think the odds are that it’ll get fixed in a hurry? For the rich and powerful, what’s the problem?
In spite of all this, we actually are seeing some tentative signs of technology being used to make government more responsive to the average citizen, including:
- SeeClickFix offers citizens a way to notify their local government about an issue of concern (often something like a pothole). If you have an iPhone, there’s even an app for that;
- Give a Minute offers Chicago residents the chance to tell the Powers That Be what would encourage them to walk, bike, or take public transportation more often; and
- The US Initiative invites ideas for how we live together in cities.
While it’s promising to come across such initiatives, reviewing their websites has left me with doubts.
When I checked SeeClickFix for my neighborhood, I found a rather ragtag group of 9 items that citizens felt needed attention – some of which were reported 10 months ago and were still open. While some were general and less likely to be fully resolved (e.g., speeding cars on a heavily traveled road), some were seemingly simple items like potholes or sidewalk hazards. In addition, only two items were listed as “Fixed,” and those solutions were reported by other members of the public. I saw nothing that indicated our local government actually looked at and responded to the issues reported. So much for government responsiveness…
Meanwhile, the other two items listed above are projects supported by CEOs for Cities, an organization that appears to be focused on making cities more responsive to their residents. According to its website, CEOs for Cities was created in 2001 and:
“CEOs for Cities is a civic lab of today’s urban leaders catalyzing a movement to advance the next generation of great American cities. CEOs for Cities works with its network partners to develop great cities that excel in the areas most critical to urban success: talent, connections, innovation and distinctiveness.”
I don’t know about you, but my eyes glazed over just reading that paragraph. The rest of the CEOs for Cities website reads the same way: lots of $10 words strung together in an academic way that is almost guaranteed to put you to sleep. Meanwhile, the Give a Minute and US Initiative websites seemed very spritely graphics-wise, but they weren’t very user-friendly. The Give a Minute site seemed particularly hard to navigate. Maybe that’s why neither site seemed to be overflowing with citizen input.
So how do we make governments as responsive as Amazon.com? Well…
- Local governments could start using things like SeeClickFix and actually fixing (or at least responding to) the items their citizens report. Establishing a good track record would benefit both the local governments and their citizens.
- The people behind CEOs for Cities and its projects could read “Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” to learn how to make their points without sounding like a bunch of ivory tower eggheads. Being clear about what they’re doing and making citizens care about it might get more people involved.
- As for the rest of us? We should start demanding that government get with the program and become part of the 21st century. With today’s technology, we expect free access to information and the opportunity to use it to improve our lives and our worlds. And we’ll become angry with those who try to restrict and control both the information and us.
It’s time we revived the principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. To the barricades!…er, keyboards!!!
Who’s the brains of this outfit? Maybe all of us
Filed under: dual nature, emergent, interconnected | Tags: change, individualism, linked world, technology
Leave a Comment Robert Wright has an interesting piece in the NY Times titled “Building One Big Brain.” In response to concerns that modern technology is affecting the way we think, he has a suggestion:
But maybe the terms of the debate — good for us or bad for us? — are a sign that we’re missing the point. Maybe the essential thing about technological evolution is that it’s not about us. Maybe it’s about something bigger than us — maybe something big and wonderful, maybe something big and spooky, but in any event something really, really big.
He goes on to propose that
…technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains — corporations, online hobby groups, far-flung N.G.O.s. And I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way.
While this may feel to us like a new phenomena, Wright notes that it’s happened before:
If it’s any consolation, we’re not the first humans to go cellular. The telephone (and for that matter the postal system before it) let people increase the number of other brains they linked up with. People spent less time with their few inherited affiliations — kin and neighbors — and more time with affiliations that reflected vocational or avocational choices.
This earlier case, Wright observes, had a major effect on Americans’ social behavior:
In the 1950 sociology classic “The Lonely Crowd,” David Riesman and two colleagues argued that the “inner-directed” American, guided by values shared with a small and stable group of kin and friends, was giving way to an “other-directed” American. Other-directed people had more social contacts, and shallower contacts, and they had more malleable values — a flexibility that let them network with more kinds of people.
In other words, Riesman, like Carr, noted a loss of coherence within the individual. He saw a loss of normative coherence — a weakening of our internal moral gyroscope — and Carr sees a loss of cognitive coherence. But in both cases this fragmenting at the individual level translates, however ironically, into broader and more intricate cohesion at the social level — cohesion of an increasingly organic sort. We’ve been building bigger social brains for some time.
The phenomena of “bigger social brains” stands as an interesting counterpoint to the fervent passion for individualism expressed today by many in politics and the media. Perhaps in some way these passionate individualists are sensing this emerging change and, frightened by the prospect, are fighting it with all they’ve got. Perhaps this is partly at the root of the fierce anger we see expressed at Tea Party gatherings and the like.
Perhaps. But if that is the case, it seems pretty clear their efforts are doomed unless they roll back technology to a time before the internet and television…and probably the telephone.
If change is being created by technology, then the only way to prevent it would be to get rid of that technology. But that’s not going to happen. Advances in technology often give new power to those who have that technology. People tend to not give up such power, especially if they see themselves engaged in a mortal fight for the “good old ways” over what they perceive as “evil new changes.” Sooner or later they’ll decide to keep the power and adapt to the change.
In any event, I think this perceived tension between individualism and the collectivism inherent in “social brains” is another reflection of an outmoded way of thinking. Sooner or later we will come to recognize that the wave/particle duality applies to humans as well as elementary particles: we are always and simultaneously both individuals and members of collective groups.
Now if we could just wrap our brains around that – both individually and socially.
Improving the Norm
Filed under: dual nature, emergent, holism | Tags: bottom up, CeaseFire, change, government, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, social norms
Leave a Comment New York Times columnist Bob Herbert had a recent column about an effort to reduce violence in Chicago. He points out that a basic problem with violent behavior is that many believe it’s just part of life, noting:
One of the most frightening aspects of the murderous violence plaguing so many urban neighborhoods across the country is the widespread notion among young people that killing somebody who ticks you off is normal. It’s something that is only to be expected, like eating when you’re hungry.
Herbert goes on to describe an initiative in Chicago called CeaseFire, which is
…trying to intervene in potentially violent situations to ward off tragic outcomes. Individuals who are most likely to be involved in violence, either as offenders or victims, are personally engaged, talked with, counseled, cajoled — whatever it takes to prevent bloodshed. Those who intervene know the streets firsthand, and in many cases are former gang members and convicts themselves.
While the immediate goal of CeaseFire is to stop the violence, the long range goal is to “change the violent norms of big-city environments.”
The program appears to be having success. According to a study by Prof. Wesley G. Skogan of Northwest University,
Over-time trends revealed that violence was down by one measure or another in six of the seven areas that were examined statistically. The broadest measure of shootings (which included attempts) declined an additional 17 to 24 percent, due to the program. In four overlapping sites there were distinctive declines in the number of persons actually shot or killed ranging from 16 to 34 percent.
CeaseFire is just one of numerous programs that take a more holistic approach to dealing with aberrant behaviors. For some time now Hobart and William Smith Colleges have been using a social norms approach to reduce binge drinking, and the program has received national attention. As an LA Times article noted in June of 2001,
The practice, called “social norms marketing,” has grown rapidly in the last three years, along with the realization that scolding, scaring, educating and even passing laws can’t stop young people from harming themselves and others. In sharp contrast to generations of adults who argued, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” the new theory encourages the young to conform, since most of their peers aren’t up to much anyway.
“The reality is, we’re herd animals and we behave in accordance with social norms and the expectations of others,” said H. Wesley Perkins, professor of sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., who is known as the father of social norms marketing. “We’re taking conformity behavior and using it in a positive way.”
The traditional approach to aberrant behavior is to view it in individualistic terms: if an individual misbehaves, it’s because there is something intrinsically wrong with them. The solution, according to this view, is to scare or browbeat the person into proper behavior.
However, if we take a cue from the wave/particle duality and recognize that people are inherently both individuals AND members of groups, we will recognize that only treating people as individuals is bound to be an incomplete approach. In addressing the context provided by the groups they belong to, the social norms approach helps create a complete approach to improving individual behaviors.
Failing Institutions
Filed under: emergent, interconnected | Tags: adaptability, Catholic Church, change, corporations, failure, Goldman Sachs, government, institutions, Pew Research Center, success, Tiger Woods, Toyota
Leave a Comment The Pew Research Center recently issued a report saying trust in government is very low, with 22% saying they can trust the government in Washington almost always or most of the time, and 19% saying they are “basically content” with the federal government.
This result got a lot of coverage in the news…and a lot of commentary from anti-government conservatives and libertarians. An example is this blog posting: 80% of Americans don’t trust the federal government; time to dissolve the people and elect another? Such a posting raises a variety of questions, including what does it mean to “dissolve the people” and what kind of math gets you from 22% trusting the government all or most of the time to 80% distrusting the government?
But there’s another, bigger question here: how much trust do people today have in other institutions? In a time when Goldman Sachs, Toyota, the Catholic Church, and Tiger Woods (a sports and business institution in his own right) have been messing up big time in the eyes of the public, is distrust in government an anomaly or just part of a trend?
As it turns out, Pew had something to say about that in the same report:
While anti-government sentiment has its own ideological and partisan basis, the public also expresses discontent with many of the country’s other major institutions. Just 25% say the federal government has a positive effect on the way things are going in the country and about as many (24%) say the same about Congress. Yet the ratings are just as low for the impact of large corporations (25% positive) and banks and other financial institutions (22%). And the marks are only slightly more positive for the national news media (31%), labor unions (32%) and the entertainment industry (33%).
Ironically, that part of the report received considerably less mention in the main stream media. But rather than dwelling on why that might be, the more interesting question is why trust in so many institutions is now so low.
As I’ve noted before, many institutions are failing because they haven’t adapted to the ways our world has changed. One thing that’s striking about many of the big institutions finding themselves in hot water these days is that a big part of their problem appears rooted in a mistaken belief that they are able to tightly manage/control the information about problematic issues. Toyota had problems with car defects; it tried to hide them. The Church had problems with perverted priests; it tried to hide them. Goldman Sachs had problems with very risky investments and very shady dealings to get rid of them; it tried to hide them. Tiger Woods had a thing for cocktail waitresses; he tried to hide it.
In an earlier, less connected time, perhaps these things wouldn’t have become such big deals. Probably past experience in hiding problems had led the leaders of these institutions to try a similar approach in these cases.
However, they apparently didn’t realize that in today’s hyper-connected world it’s almost inevitable that bad things will come to light – whether it’s vehicle flaws, priests behaving badly, devious investment strategies, or adulterous affairs. And now when the news DOES come out, the impact is likely to be much greater than it might have been before the Internet and global communications – especially if it’s apparent there was a cover-up involved.
These cases are all examples of how the world has changed but the people in leadership positions – who generally came to power the old fashioned way – were caught unaware of those changes. They may have achieved success by following the old rules, but times have changed and many of the old rules no longer apply.
Interestingly, I discussed this recently with a friend who used to handle corporate communications for a very large company. This friend had observed the same thing in their work:
(When I was there)…our CEO and other execs still believed you could “control the message.” It was a never ending battle to try to enlighten them to the realities of the wired world. Bottom line, it’s more convenient for them (and they are a proxy for all big business, the Church, etc) to try to perpetuate the command-and-control, one-way approach to communicating than to face up to the fact that there is no control and that “managing” their constituents effectively requires transparency, engagement and a true alignment between rhetoric and behavior. All of that is just too much work, and too threatening, for them to accept. It’s a brotherhood of ostriches — and sadly (ironically?), they’re proud of it.
So what does the future hold?
I think this time is like any other in which great change has taken place. Some people and institutions will adapt to change and thrive; others will fail to adapt and fall by the wayside, deserted by their former supporters and clients.
Some may loudly protest the change and uncertainty of today’s world. They may even gain enough influence to hamper some institutions’ ability to adapt to these changes. But they can’t stop the change itself. In attempting to turn back the clock and to resurrect an illusory past they will be much like a bunch of Americans in the Panama Canal Zone back in 1964: all they are likely to accomplish is a quicker demise of the institutions they had hoped to preserve.
I’ve never been a believer in the so-called “Wisdom of the Market” as the term applied to Wall Street. But I do believe in the idea as it applies to transformational times and ideas. When the times are changing, the ones who understand and adapt to those changes will be the ones who thrive in what comes.
In the end we will be left with a combination of old institutions that adapted and new institutions that saw a better way and followed it. Everything else will just be history.
New Terms for New Times
Filed under: complexity, dual nature, emergent | Tags: Democrats, liberals, liberaltarianism, libertarianism
Leave a Comment Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
- Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”
It’s tough enough to live in a time like the present, when things are changing in so many ways. What makes it even tougher is that language often fails us. While we may have vague ideas about how things are changing, we have two problems in talking about those changes.
The first involves the uncertainty that inevitably revolves around great change. We find ourselves asking “what’s going on?”; “what does it all mean?”; and “how do I deal with it?” If we aren’t sure about what’s happening and what it means, we won’t be able to talk about it with any great assurance.
But beyond that there’s the problem of terminology. The words we use are based on shared past experience. If you tell a friend “my car has a flat tire,” the sentence is understandable because you and your friend both know what a car is, what a tire is, and what getting a flat tire means. If you could somehow go back in time 150 years and tell someone “my car has a flat tire,” they wouldn’t know what you are talking about because they’ve never seen a car or a tire, and have no idea why it would matter if the tire is flat.
An example of this terminology problem is the recent flurry of blog activity about a relatively new term: “liberaltarianism.” The word, coined by Will Wilkinson, apparently points to a new perspective on creating workable policies:
I predict Democrats will become somewhat more receptive to arguments that certain less centralized, more market-oriented policies do a better job of achieving liberal goals than do the more heavily centralized, technocratic policies favored by current Democratic opinion elites.
A problem Wilkinson has here is coming up with a suitable label for such adaptable Democrats. Apparently believing that Democrats are associated with liberalism and market-oriented policies are associated with libertarianism, he uses the conjoined terms to reflect the conjoined concepts.
However, both “liberal” and “libertarianism” carry a heavy load of conceptual baggage: many people have strong beliefs and associations with each word, and the discussion of Wilkinson’s concept seems to often founder on that baggage. Liberals express concern about libertarians taking over the Democratic party; libertarians dismiss any possibility of change among Democrats. In both cases, the argument revolves around the labels.
I believe it is possible to have Democrats who favor “market-oriented policies” rather than the old, centralized approach to problem solving. I think in many cases it’s even essential for Democrats to adopt such approaches. The problem is, what might we call such people?
I have a suggestion.
While he may not be aware of it in so many words, what Wilkinson is really talking about here is a shift from the inflexible, mechanical world view of Newtonian mechanics to the adaptable, organic world view inherent in the modern science of complexity.
John F. Schmit, a military consultant and writer who has been closely associated with Marine Corps doctrine since 1986, gave a lecture at the National Defense University in 1998 titled Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory. He concluded that military success required a shift from the prevalent mechanical world view:
The physical sciences have dominated our world since the days of Newton. Moreover, the physical sciences have provided the mechanistic paradigm that frames our view of the nature of war. While some systems do behave mechanistically, the latest scientific discoveries tell us that most things in our world do not function this way at all. The mechanistic paradigm no longer adequately describes our world—or our wars. Complex systems—including military organizations, military evolutions, and war—most definitely do not behave mechanistically. Enter complexity.
Complexity encourages us to consider war in different terms which in turn point to a different approach to the command and control of military action. It will be an approach that does not expect or pursue certainty or precise control but is able to function despite uncertainty and disorder. If there is a single unifying thread to this discussion, it is the importance of adaptation, both for success on the battlefield and for institutional survival. In any environment characterized by unpredictability, uncertainty, fluid dynamics, and rapid change, the system that can adapt best and most quickly will be the system that prevails. Complexity suggests that the single most important quality of effective command and control for the coming uncertain future will be adaptability.
For the same reasons, liberal Democrats need to shift away from what Wilkinson describes as “…heavily centralized, technocratic policies favored by current Democratic opinion elites.” Such policies are based in a mechanical world view; they seek out control over problems just as a driver seeks to control a truck. We might describe supporters of such policies as “mechanistic Democrats.” (I thought for a moment of using the term “machine Democrats,” but that has its own history and baggage – especially here in Albany.)
As for Wilkinson’s more adaptable Democrats, I would suggest using a label that reflects their non-mechanical approach. As adaptability is a quality inherent in all living organisms, we might refer to them as “organic Democrats.”
Clarifying this distinction between the old and new ways of evaluating policies will help us understand how they differ, without getting bogged down in discussions of labels. And any terms that help us understand our changing world has got to help us in adapting to it.
As John Schmit observed, adaptability is key.
