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Posts Tagged ‘TIME’

Let’s be honest. Al Gore can come across as a pretentious, pedantic bore. His political enemies have done a great job of convincing most Americans that Gore takes personal credit for inventing the internet. (By the way, he doesn’t. During a 1999 CNN interview, he spoke about taking the initiative as vice-president to foster, economically and legislatively, the technology that we now know as the internet.) But Gore’s formality and stiffness in otherwise relaxed situations along with a tendency to sound self-righteous play right into the hands of those that perpetuate this notion.

That said, as the New York Times reviewer noted, Gore’s latest book, “The Future:Six Drivers of Global Change” is worth checking out for two ideas that it introduces. Reviewer Chrystia Freeland writes: “The first is the premise. Gore believes we are living in a ‘new period of hyperchange.’ The speed at which our world is changing…is unprecedented, and that transformation is the central reality of our lives. The technology revolution, Gore writes, ‘is now carrying us with it at a speed beyond our imagining toward ever newer technologically shaped realities that often appear, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, ‘indistinguishable from magic.’’”

“Gore’s second big argument is based on this first one,” Freeland writes. Since we’re experiencing these major economic and sociological changes, we need to think about the local, regional, and geo-political implications. Gore seems to believe that the nation-state is fast becoming irrelevant and talks about how globalization has really transformed business into Earth, Inc. And, he believes that if America doesn’t lead the rest of the world in developing a viable international reaction to these rapid changes, that the world will stay stuck in the paradigm that we’ve inherited from previous, less complicated centuries.

Of course, Al Gore isn’t the only person who believes that the business world has some issues such as “quarterly democracy” which need to be addressed. There are some, and I include themselves among them, who believe that this period of Capitalism is reminiscent of the days of the robber barons from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In a recent TIME essay, “The Curious Capitalist” Rana Forooha talks about the short-termism of our system of shareholder capitalism and about those “calling for not only corporate pay and tax reforms but also a more Germanic-style stakeholder capitalism that can spread the benefits of a company’s growth more evenly among labor, management and shareholders.”

For capitalism to remain viable, it’s important that the population be economically productive. However, new technologies are enabling companies to employ “robosourcing” which eliminates a high percentage of workers from the equation. If memory serves, Gore mentions software which can be used by legal firms to do the work of 10,000 legal interns. Not great news for law students who’ve invested all that time, money and effort in their educations.
With people living longer and healthier lives, society is going to need to figure out a way to keep the population productively employed so that they can participate not only as conscientious citizens but also as active consumers who stoke the engines of capitalism with their purchases and contribute to the government coffers via taxes.

Along with unemployment, the overall growth of the world population, the aging of populations in first world nations, “The Future” also addresses water quality and shortages, top soil depletion and, of course, the effects of global warming. I have to admit that the Malthusian in me started wondering about the impact these dilemmas would have on fear and the growth of intolerance which generates hate groups like neo-Nazis, radical Islamists, and the like.

In his New York Times review of “The Future”, Michiko Kakutani says Gore is most convincing “when he refrains from editorializing and sticks to analyzing how changes in technology, our political climate and the environment are going to affect the world, often creating domino and cascadelike effects.” For instance, how the growth of the Internet and proliferation of mobile phones in developing countries has helped closed the information gap and increased the opportunity for “robust democratic discourse” but also increases threats to privacy and cybersecurity. Or how 3-D printing raises questions about intellectual property as well as copyright and patent law and how advances in science technology might soon create ethical dilemmas when parents have the opportunity to create “designer babies” with the ability to choose not only hair and eye color but also height, strength, and intelligence characteristics.

“The Future” is an ambitious project. Probably,too much so. Gore tries to educate us with a comprehensive, holistic overview about how various factors (business, population, environment, technology, information) interrelate but the effect can be overwhelming. Add Al Gore’s wooden and ponderous communication style to the mix and you might find your mind wandering as you wade through it. Nevertheless, it’s worth the effort. As Gore observes: “We as human beings now face a choice: either to be swept along by the powerful currents of technological change and economic determinism into a future that may threaten our deepest values, or to build a capacity for collective decision making on a global scale.”

Something to think about.

In his recent TIME essay , The History of the American Dream, Jon Meacham observes: “Strangely, it’s now possible for the French to be move socially and economically mobile than Americans”.

So much for the American capitalism vs. European socialism argument.

Meanwhile, in one of his recent columns, David Brooks writes about America: “Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary concern.”

During the 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos came up with “It’s The Economy, Stupid” for Bill Clinton. Twenty years later, it’s the economy again. Or, for our more granular 21st century speak, “Jobs”.

The Washington Monthly’s summer issue focuses on the economic debate that our politicians aren’t having, the erosion of the average American family’s wealth and its relation to the country’s future success. In the information overload of our daily lives, it’s easy to respond to the bumper sticker language of campaigns and to forget that America doesn’t live in isolation from the rest of the world. More than ever, it’s a global economy and those in power are frequently not in a position to lead as much as to react.

Personally, I’ve been an advocate for a WPA-type of approach to getting the unemployed back to work while fixing the country’s neglected infrastructure. Rather than extending federal unemployment benefits, it would seem more logical to use those dollars to put people back to work doing something useful which not only helps the country but also provides those involved with a sense of purpose and pride.

However, as the Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris and Phillip Longman point out: “With household asset levels so depleted, it’s folly to think that the economy can be set right merely by adding more jobs, however much they’re needed. That’s the lesson of the Great Depression and World War II. As James K. Galbraith has pointed out.., the New Deal built infrastructure and put Americans back to work, but failed to spark self-sustaining economic growth. It was ‘the war, an only the war that restored..the financial wealth of the American middle class.’.”

Hopefully, we won’t need to resort to another world war in order to get our financial house back in order. That’s not a solution that any of us wants to ponder. However, watching what’s been going on in Europe and in the Middle East shouldn’t make any of us feel too complacent.

So, if the U.S. is going to get back on track, all of us, you and me included, are going to have to urge our political leaders to focus on uniting rather dividing the country along ideological lines. In his TIME article, Jon Meacham writes: “We are stronger the wider we open our arms… Our dreams are more powerful when they are shared by others in our time and we are the only ones who can create a climate for the American Dream to survive another generation.”

As Aesop noted in one of his fables a long time ago, “United we stand. Divided we fall.”