Results tagged “future” from Eccentric Eclectica

I just want to juxtapose two recent readings by Charlie Stross and Timothy Burke on organizations and institutions. Burke sets up the problem as the key issue of the twenty-first century.

but it really seems to me that the political problem of the 21st Century is not a problem of markets or capitalism, not of the state, not of ideologies or religions, but of institutions and organizations. Loosely speaking, what doesn’t work about government as a whole is also what doesn’t work about a local religious charity. What doesn’t work about financial capitalism is what doesn’t work about the Chamber of Commerce in a small town.

Why have executives at for-profit and non-profit institutions enriched themselves so greatly over the last twenty or thirty years? Is there any way for oversight to actually improve the situation?

The subtle problem that organizations and institutions pose to contemporary life is that people who live inside an institutional culture often are so sensitive to the nuances of the way things work, the limits and possibilities of change within the institution, that they let problems and failures slide or pass. No one wants to be that guy, the one who rants about everything. And that’s what often happens to someone inside an institution who blows the whistle on a bad practice or a growing issue, because that often ends with that person in a kind of internal exile, and in that circumstance, a loss of a sense of proportion is all but inevitable. Everything will come to look suspect or corrupt.

Stross poses the problem in the form a science fiction scenario: how would you design the society of a generation starship that is going to be traveling through space for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years? None of our current institutions have ever lasted that long. Even long lasting institutions, like the Catholic church or Japanese monarchy, have changed.

Consumer capitalism along our current model simply won’t work as a way of running a long-duration generation ship (the failure modes are lethal and non-recoverable). Communism (or rather, Leninism) has a slightly better prospect, but is still a long way from optimal. Monarchism is just a pretty word for “hereditary dictatorship supported by military caste”. What are the alternatives? And what do we need to consider when designing a society that can survive for a 500-1000 year voyage in a bottle without exploding?

It’s not hart to twist the generation starship scenario slightly and end up with Bucky Fuller’s Starship Earth. The problem of building a long-term starship is parallel to the problem of building a long-term lifeworld here on Earth. Both Stross and Burke agree that our current institutions aren’t up to the challenge.

Burke concludes his musings:

Institutions work best through and are safeguarded most by strong cultures of professionalism, loyalty, and honor. Institutions are most at risk from parasitic infiltrations which adroitly use professionalism and loyalty as shields and weapons, who act like cancer cells, turning healthy structures into diseased ones. Problems of cultural maintainance and cultural creation are the hardest of all, because they can only be worked upon through incremental action within culture, with a humble sense of the immediate horizons of plausible transformations.

But the fate of institutions can’t just be left to them alone, because even the least of them has some kind of consequential social and economic power. If we need to think about how to live better within our institutions, we also need to think about how to act more wisely towards the institutions of others, to concern ourselves with their workings and when necessary, find smarter and more humane ways to intervene in their affairs and even to shut them down. The tools we have aren’t up to it, and the habits we have even less so.

James Fallows published an interesting essay in the January/February 2010 Atlantic on “How America Can Rise Again.” I think it’s one of the best pieces I’ve read on the American penchant for declension narratives. He points out that Americans have been engaging in jeremiads about the decline of the nation since before there was a nation. The Puritans were complaining about the lost golden age of the colonies just six years after landing in the New World. So from the historical perspective there’s nothing new under the sun. To bolster this argument Fallows mentions The American Jeremiad by Sacvan Bercovitch (another book for the to be read pile).

On the positive side of the ledger Fallows puts America’s openness to immigrants and our schools.

“We scream about our problems, but as long as we have the immigrants, and the universities, we’ll be fine,” James McGregor, an American businessman and author who has lived in China for years, told me. “I just wish we could put LoJacks on the foreign students to be sure they stay.” While, indeed, the United States benefits most when the best foreign students pursue their careers here, we come out ahead even if they depart, since they take American contacts and styles of thought with them. Shirley Tilghman, a research biologist who is now the president of Princeton, made a similar point more circumspectly. “U.S. higher education has essentially been our innovation engine,” she told me. “I still do not see the overall model for higher education anywhere else that is better than the model we have in the United States, even with all its challenges at the moment.” Laura Tyson, an economist who has been dean of the business schools at UC Berkeley and the University of London, said, “It can’t be a coincidence that so many innovative companies are located where they are”—in California, Boston, and other university centers. “There is not another country’s system that does as well—although others are trying aggressively to catch up.”

The main problem he sees in contemporary America is public-private partnerships or the lack of them. There are major problems that need to be addressed: jobs, debt, military strength, and overall economic independence. What will happen if America is no longer the wealthiest nation on the planet or the consumer of last resort? We could address these problems but there is no sign that the political infrastructure is up to the task.

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

He goes on to cite another interesting book by Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations. According to Olson special interest groups gain power over time in any governmental system and eventually they nibble away at the public institutions that were once capable of coping with our problems. Fallows concludes that the only way forward is to muddle through as best we can with the gangrenous system.

My recent trawls around the internet have brought up some interesting finds that seem to cross ideological lines. A week ago David Brooks fired off a column linking the recent recession to a decline in America’s financial values. Brooks decries the growth of debt and consumption as a falling away from our previous virtues of hard work and thrift. I put on my very skeptical hat whenever I hear someone talking about decline from a previous golden age, but I think that Brooks may have something.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

At the same time I’ve been following some of the depressing links David Pollard has been posting on environmental decline. Pollard and the people he links to approach the problem from a liberal perspective that is different from Brooks. Sharon Astyck starts off with a piece calling for us to dream up a new life for the future.

And other analyses are equally problematic.  It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that radical lifestyle changes are coming, whether we like them or not - whether they come from adapting to a deeply damaged climate or from addressing the crisis, whether they come from adapting to depletion or from enduring it, our lifestyle will not be the same for very long.   And the danger of telling people that they can have all the things they want - a future for their children and an affluent present now - is that when they realize (and they are realizing right now) that this is not true, that there’s not enough money, or time or alternative energy to provide it, people will be very, very angry indeed.  It is not pleasant to tell people hard truths.  It is less pleasant to deal with people facing hard truths who believe they have been lied to.  I believe we are seeing the early stages of the political unrest that will accompany this sense of being lied to, of having lost more than is being accounted for on both the left or the right, and I also believe quite strongly that unless a true and comprehensible story is offered, false ones will be taken up, and used as bludgeons….

It is a counter-intuitive, and thus difficult thought,  that after a certain critical mass of affluence, better comes from less, not more.  A better future for our children comes not from greater affluence, but less, and the preservation of resources for the future.  A better life for us in the present involves fewer hours of work, and thus, more freedom - and fewer possessions and less affluence.

Astyck and Brooks are saying the same thing: we need to curb our baser impulses and live a thriftier life. One of them sees the problem as impending environmental doom the other as an economic and moral dissolution. Both of them reach the same conclusion that we need to rein in the profligate way of life we’ve become accustomed to during the past 40 years, especially in America. If there is any common ground between conservatives and liberals I think it will be built on this ground.

If you read anything related to academic culture and universities then you are bound to encounter the complaints about the adjuntification of academic labor. More and more universities are relying on adjuncts to teach classes. Most people explain this as a need to save costs. Others may get more conspiratorial.

The prevailing opinion among a lot of people seems to be that going to graduate school, especially in the humanities Ph.D. programs, is a waste of time and a veil of tears.

So, we conclude that academia has a surplus of labor that needs better use.

Now for our second problem: the peer review system is broken. Mr. Myers argues, quite rightly, that there are too many burdens placed on current academics: reviewing, grant proposals, books, articles, and teaching. Expecting someone to fairly review eight papers a month is a lot, especially if we want good feedback.

So, we conclude that academia places excessive demands upon members.

I have no solutions to this problem. But cannot there be a way to unite these two thread, surely there is a supply of labor that could meet some of the demand for reviewers.

Never have so few been so sure of their own rightness. That is my reaction to this morning’s meeting of the MN Futurists. I’m sorry to say this, because I like the principle of the group, but the reality today was a bunch of old white men exercising their sense of dudgeon.

The topic of the day was immigration, a sensitive issue to be sure. Some of the initial presentations raised good issues about the immigration policy of America but the discussion was quite different. For a group of amateur futurists there was a remarkable level of certainty about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.

My jaw almost fell out of my head when one of the audience members told everyone that we had to look at the problem from a systems perspective and then, in the very next breath, linked the problem of affordable housing to the poor family culture of non-white people. He argued that housing requires a job, which requires an education, which requires a family structure that values education and therefore we should require all adult immigrants to participate in ESL immersion classes as soon as they arrive in our country.

A real systems perspective emphasizes all the parts of the system when looking for a solution or a point of intervention.

In the systems perspective, once one has identified the system as a separate part of the universe, one is not allowed to progressively decompose the system into isolated parts. Instead, one is obligated to describe the system as a whole. If one uses separation into parts, as part of the description of the system properties, this is only part of a complete description of the behavior of the whole, which must include a description of the relationships between these parts and any additional information needed to describe the behavior of the entire system.

Further, in a systems perspective one should be careful about considering the system in the context of the environment and not as an isolated entity. Thus one should include the interactions and relationships between the system and the environment.

The presenter to the group, Elizabeth Glidden, responded that as an expectant parent she would need to spend a minimum of $200 per week on childcare. The only way for a family to do this and afford housing is for both parents to work.

Our interlocutor from the audience replied that a significant number of people choose homeschooling. (2% to be precise. Does this person really understand the meaning of significant?) Some families “find homeschooling to be a cheaper alternative than the public schools.” Cheaper? In what possible way is homeschooling cheaper than public school or daycare.

When people say something is cheaper they usually mean that it costs less or saves money. So you have a family with two incomes. They spend 30% of their monthly income on housing. Then they have a child and they decide to homeschool. Is this really “cheaper?” At best homeschooling is only cheaper if you consider the labor of the stay-at-home parent to be completely uncompensated. A homeschooling family may indeed be spending less money per month because they don’t pay out money for childcare. But the tradeoff for that is a significantly lower savings rate.

The group dynamic in these situations is really interesting to observe. Most of the people who speak up in this group have been coming for a long time and each of them has a particular ideé fixe into which discussions inevitably bend. People don’t listen to each other because they’ve heard all the arguments before.

The anti-immigration arguments boiled down to three points:

• Immigration is bad because diversity causes cultural division and balkanization. See here for a refutation.
• Immigration is bad because it leads to increased consumption of natural resources. A Hmong person driving an SUV in St. Paul has a much bigger carbon footprint than a Hmong person still living in Laos.
• Immigration is bad because current federal policy is rooted in deception. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 led to a dramatic increase in immigration, especially non-white immigration, so therefore the people who wrote the law must have intended to change the cultural composition of America. I call this the conspiracy theory. Refutations to take place on your own.

The only interesting argument in this bunch is the second. It’s clear that people in the United States consume much more natural resources and produce more pollution than people in the rest of the world. But to say that immigration is the cause or solution for this problem is a big jump.

All Americans have been living a cadillac lifestyle for many years, even before the legal changes of 1965. For any individual immigrant the marginal increase in resource consumption and pollution is trivial compared to the overconsumption we’ve all been living with. Shutting off immigration to this country isn’t going to solve the environmental problem. It might be part of the solution but it is hardly the end of the discussion.

I called this entry “Sense of Authority” because I was so astounded by the certainty with which all of these people spoke about the future. I’m not even sure if I can call this futurism because it bears so little connection to the complex systems view of futurism that I hold. I think it’s more accurate to say that the tropes of futurism and engineering (systems perspectives, statistics) became cloaks for political positions.

Given the age of most of the participants in this group my experience may be representative of what future studies used to be. If the profession were founded today things might be very different.

There were more silly things said today but they will have to wait for another post.

Derrick de Kerckhove is the director of the McLuhan program at the University of Toronto and has the following things to say in a recent interview.

TF: What will be the key societal impact of mobile telephony/Internet?

De Kerckhove: Acceleration. Mobile telephony and Internet is accelerating society in at least two ways: Vastly increasing the volume of human transactions, and reducing the time delay between transactions.
...
The difference between today's accumulation of knowledge and connectivity and that of the Renaissance is qualitative as well as quantitative. While the printing press distributed knowledge in different places and different formats with comparatively slow access routes, the mobile Internet gives access to all of that information and infinitely more of it anywhere, anytime. Ever more efficient search engines are making that access not just merely pertinent but "hypertinent" which is the logic of the memory in our brains. Every time we think, we summon the most pertinent information available in our mind. Imagine having the same kind of access to the contents of everybody else's mind at once. It's quite literally mind-boggling.

The first paragraph states the obvious point that society is accelerating, although it dose enumerate two important dimensions to the acceleration: volume and delay.

The second paragraph is more interesting. I especially like the 'hypertinent' coining. This extension of our own memory to the global memory represented in search engines is the beginning of the creative extension that I predict will happen over the next several decades as our minds become intertwined with subagents (computer progams and interpersonal data connections). That term needs a better name but I haven't found it yet.