Cycles in Nature, Politics and Religion

We generally don’t think of our lives in terms of cycles except those related to tides and seasons. With the exception of the celestial cycles, we live in the present, rue the past and hope for the future. The world, however, behaves cyclically in many ways. We mortal creatures are born, mature, age and die. The length of the cycles varies greatly. The human cycle in this day and age in the industrialized world is about 80 years long but a millennium ago it was half that. An insect’s cycle, on the other hand is less than one year. The Roman Empire rose and fell. Governments go through cycles, some long, some short with some ending gradually while others come to abrupt ends. The British Empire had a life cycle of several centuries and is still in the process of a very gradual decline. The Mongol Empire started by Genghis Khan, conquered much of the civilized world and lasted a few generations until the black plague sent them back to retire quietly in Mongolia. The Aztec Empire came to an abrupt end at the hand of a small number of superiorly armed Spaniards. The Inca Society disappeared into the jungles for reasons yet unknown. The Soviet Union rose and fell in mere decades. Its demise, though abrupt, was not violent. Our countries position in the world will also fade some day. Will our decline be orderly as was the Brits and take centuries or will it end abruptly in a violent war. Will we hold our position another ten, one hundred or one thousand years? The answers will, to a great extent, be determined by the skill of our leaders and our wisdom in selecting them.
I read or heard somewhere years ago that, unlike the specific cases cited above there are general cycles in governance. These are continuous. A monarchy evolves into a democracy which leads eventually to anarchy. To restore order requires a tyrannical regime and as order is restored, the powers in place continue ruling and become a monarchy. The cycle repeats. The Soviet Union is an example of a very quick cycle lasting only one lifetime. The monarchy was overthrown followed by a very brief attempt at democracy. Russia fell into anarchy bringing in Lenin followed by one of the most tyrannical leaders in history, Stalin. Order was restored and, though not a traditional monarchy with kings and crowns but one with a strong ruling class was established. Their control lasted till the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is not clear to me where Russia is in its cycle now. In a few decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union it may have gone through the democracy, anarchy stage, has passed the tyranny stage and is sliding into a monarchy under Putin.
The big question since man has had the ability to reason is how did we come to be and how will we end? The followers of the God of Abraham (Jews, Christians and Muslims) have a narrative that has man starting with Adam and Eve and ending at some point. Many, if not most, in the industrialized world believe man has evolved over many millions of years much as was described by Darwin. Much of Fundamentalist Christendom, on the other hand, believe that man literally started in Eden a few thousand years ago and unlike their kin, envision a full cycle from beginning to end. They believe that the end is near and if the Anti-Christ is not already here, he will be soon leading us into an Armageddon and in the Rapture.
The Hindus believe that there is a very long cycle within which are numerous minor cycles. Intellectually it makes sense to me. (If I am not mistaken, we are currently just beginning the downward slide). After all we have the rises and falls of empires, the comings and goings of ice ages and the beginnings and ends of species and beliefs. The large cycle could be the appearances and disappearances of “intelligent” beings.
All of the above was really only my excuse to segue into one of my favorite stories. A Sage in India (I believe it was The Buddha) was once asked how long this major cycle called a Culpa, really is. His response went something like this: Imagine a dove carrying a silk scarf in its beak drags it over the peak of the Himalayas once every hundred years. A Culpa is the amount of time it will take the dove to wear away the mountain. The thing I like about this measure of time is that it is finite, giving a real sense of a very, very long time. Unlike terms like eons, endless or infinite everyone hearing the story comes away with a similar sense of this time. In fact an engineer with nothing better to do with his life, could calculate a reasonable estimate. They would figure out the mass and consequently the number of molecules currently in the Himalayas. They will need to determine the average length of the dove’s trip as the mountain erodes, calculate the number of molecules the scarf moves as it glides over the surface and finally project the number of years.
So we have hundreds of narratives with many theories about the cycle governing our existence on Earth from the several thousand to the answer the calculation above would yield. Unfortunately many of us are absolutely convinced that our belief in the cycle of man is the right one but the probability is very high that none of us may even be close.

Slavery - Free Markets Unfettered

There is strong disagreement as to whether the Free Market needs any guidance, how much and if so, from whom. The right tends to think that there should be little guidance and it should come from the business world with the Libertarians believing it should have none because left to its own devices the market will resolve all problems. The liberals, on the other hand are sensitive to the collateral damage resulting from unencumbered market activities and feel that government needs to guide the market to minimize the damage done to the people selling labor. People bringing their labor to the market are generally the ones suffering most from the dynamics of the markets. Both sides profess to be in favor of a free market and indeed, to a degree they both are.

The free market works. It basically is a system wherein goods, services and labor are exchanged on a global scale. In theory it works on the principle that in commerce, pursuit of individual self-interest collectively results in benefits to the overall society. We tend to speak of free markets, democracy, socialism, monarchy, etc. as if they were like systems. It’s like mixing apples and oranges or better yet apples and pomegranate juice. Free market capitalism is an economic system whereas a democracy is a system of governing. One can have a totalitarian system of government that works on free market economic principles. The market, in and of itself, has nothing inherent in it driving for the betterment of society. The fact that it does is strictly coincidental. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, refers to the force that serves the general good as the “invisible hand”. T
Unlike business whose quest is individual benefit, the role of a government, whether it does it well or for that matter at all, is to ensure that its population prospers. In commerce, one of its key role is keeping the market free and ensuring that the self-interest of individuals translate into benefit for society.

I firmly believe that for the free markets to work for the well and benefit, not only the individual but an entire population, it must have some level of regulation from somewhere and that somewhere is the government. Furthermore, I believe that the market unfettered will not only fail the betterment of society but will collapse. The challenge is to provide it just enough guidance. Too much and it will not function and too little it will choke. I would like to use slavery as an example of damage done to society when a free market is unrestricted and show how long it takes to recover. To this day, the damage done to a society by slavery, driven by market forces, has not as yet been completely mended.

During the 17th century North America was settled by Europeans funded with money from European corporations looking to extract raw materials from the “New World” and create markets for commodities manufactured in their countries. (The Plymouth Plantation was such an enterprise.) There was plenty of land to be taken at low to no cost from the Natives. The land in the North, though good, was not suited for large agro-businesses and could be farmed by family members with occasional assistance from outside labor. The land in the South, on the other hand, was plentiful and fertile and the weather ideal for large plantations. The problem was that to fully realize these advantages it took much more labor than was available in a family. The people who acquired the land through their European Governments couldn’t hire enough laborers nor could they get enough indentured servants working off their debt from Europe, to realize the full potential of their enterprises. The promise of slave labor became very appealing.

Slaves were not brought here to save on labor costs. In fact the wages paid to “free” labor at that time were not much above what it cost a family to eat and have a roof over their heads and even though slaves were not paid, they had to be bought, fed and housed. The problem was availability of labor in the South, not the cost. Slavery solved this. Driven by self-interest, the plantation owners come up with a working solution to maximize their profits. In that sense the market worked. Even the unintended benefit to the society as a whole was realized if you don’t count the population of African origin brought into this country as slave though they represented a large percentage of the total population in the young country. The slave traders were also free marketers. They recognized a demand in the market (slaves), raised capitol to fund the transatlantic journey, kidnapped a bunch of people from Africa and made a whole lot of money doing it. The governments of Europe interfered with slave trade in their respective countries, finding the enslavement of human beings immoral and outlawed slavery. Europe had plenty of labor so slavery was of no great financial benefit to them anyway. On this continent, however, the commerce created through the labor of slaves was a huge part of the economy and a strong contributor to its success. Thus it was allowed in the New World. After gaining independence, our government could have and should have interceded on the basis of the Constitution. After all the founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The stakes were very high and the “powers that be” having strong influence in politics as they always do, did not allow this principle to come into play when it came to slavery. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, though it worked for the majority, fell asleep for society as a whole. It needed some guidance.

So people kidnapped in Africa were brought to the Colonies, bought and sold and forced to labor for their masters. Not only did the government not de-legitimize slavery, laws were passed to ensure their continued servitude. Their culture was destroyed and the family structure devastated. The meaning of head of a household became diluted and the slave owners or their minions made the decision regarding the well being, to the extent there was any, of families. Lost were any relationships with how hard one toiled and how well one lived. Yes, there were varying degrees of “magnanimity” among slave owners but under any circumstances a slave was still a slave.

After a while, people, including church going ones in the South, started questioning the morality of slavery and the plantation owners were faced with a populist move to eliminate it. This created a business dilemma. Being good businessmen and driven by self-interest they found a solution. We humans tend to tolerate mistreatment if the mistreated are though to be members of another species, not ours. For example, the Germans during the Second World War treated Western European prisoners of war in relative humane ways consistent with the customs of war at the time. However, they had convinced themselves that Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, were subhuman and thus perpetrated all kinds of atrocities in Poland and Russia that were not seen in France or Holland. Realizing this, the plantation owners launched a propaganda campaign to dehumanize the Africans and thus stem the moralizing on the part of people of conscience. They painted the Africans as ignorant, incapable of anything but rudimentary learning, child-like and lazy, lacking any virtues and just barely fit to the tasks plantation owners assigned them. In fact, they tried to convince people that the slave owners were doing the slaves a favor by housing and feeding them. This propaganda was so effective, that to this day there are still pockets, particularly in the South, where the propaganda originated and was focused, that still believe this dribble.

It took a couple of centuries and a civil war to end slavery and another near century to allow African Americans to vote, ride in the front of a buss and drink from the same water fountain as Whites. Unlike European immigrants who easily integrated into our society, former slaves could not until very recently. The effectiveness of the propaganda and their strong distinction from the Europeans majority by virtue of their colour, essentially confined them to all Black communities. Not only had their culture been destroyed, because of their isolation, they could not benefit from assimilation into the existing culture that was the conglomeration of the better parts of all the other cultures brought into this country.

Even with intervention, it took hundreds of years to reach the current state. Though greatly improved, there is still damage uncorrected. Attempts to try to mitigate the long lasting effects of slavery introduces by the progressives were not met with popular support. One such project was Affirmative Action that gives an advantage to African Americans in employment and education. The argument against such policies is that now that we are indeed equal we all have an equal chance. Slavery is a long gone thing now and, though the slaves were indeed taken advantage of, the African American population today is not. If you want to take something away from someone, take it away from those that benefited from slavery, families of plantation owners. Furthermore, families of new immigrants did not benefit from slavery so why should they be required to pay retribution?

The fact of the matter is that the majority of the population benefited then and is still benefiting from slavery. The availability of slave labor created commerce that spawned many enterprises unrelated to farming. It helped created a nation with a strong economy, allowing it to continue as a vibrant democracy (except for slaves) and grow in power and prestige. People immigrating to this country today do so because of this evolution. Their success is in part a result of the slaves work. On the other hand, slavery and the propaganda justifying it along with the laws that encouraged and enforced segregation, has greatly disadvantaged descendants of slaves and these effects still lingers to this day..

Getting back to free markets; market forces have worked and when it came to slavery in the Americas, it allowed for the creation of great wealth. The commercial possibilities were so large that it was allowed to function without any intervention until the Civil War. Self-interest was successful and the “invisible hand” worked for the majority of the population’s benefited. But without a “guiding hand” there was great collateral damage done to a significant portion of our population and to the moral fiber of our Nation. It has taken over one hundred years to recover and we still have some way to go

Parenting

Last night I saw a clip of Sarah Palin addressing a School in Ohio (it may have been Pennsylvania) to which she brought 250 cookies to distribute to the children. Supposedly a school board somewhere in Ohio had restricted the number of sweets served to their kids. Sarah wanted to make the point that it is not the Governments business but the parents what the kids eat. It turned out that, in fact, the school board she referred did not restrict sweets but recommended that healthy foods also be made available for snacks. But I digress.

I have a strong conviction that children are an asset or liability to an entire community and not the “property” or sole responsibility of the parents. (I discussed this point of view in the post on education). It is interesting that prior to the birth, the left feels that the fate of the fetus is in the hands of the mother whereas the right feels it is in the hands of the government. As soon as the child is born, the tables turn and the right feels that the parents are solely responsible for the child and at the extreme its schooling, whereas the left feels that, particularly in schooling, there is a role for government in the child’s well being. The degree of control of a parent over the child, or for that matter the family varies with the level of development in a society. In Japan, during the feudal era, the head of the household, the man, had total control of the family and by law had the right to kill any member without consequence. In current primitive societies, heads of the family also have, absolute, though not lethal control.

Currently there are laws that prohibit the extreme, overt irresponsibility of parents. I don’t believe anyone on either side of the isle has a problem with laws that prevent cruelty and lethal neglect. These laws are examples of government interference in private affairs currently in place. How far should a government go to ensure that society benefits from the lives that are brought into it. A child is born and either blessed or cursed with great of lousy parents. To further complicate matters the great of lousy parents were also children once themselves and either blessed or cursed with parents. Is, and should, the fate of the child be strictly in the hands of the parent? Is there a role the government can play to improve the odds for success of every individual? There is no question that parents are essential to the well being of a child. Even totally dysfunctional parents, though they diminish probability of success, are probably better than most institutions.

Government already intercedes on behalf of children by providing mandatory public education and in cases where children are undernourished, food along with some protection. Can. or should it do more. There is a feeling, particularly on the right, that government can’t do anything right. Or should we just allow a child to suffer the “luck of the draw” and become either an asset or a drain on society. Obesity, for example, is a health problem for the individual and a huge expense for society. It is not only a familial problem, but also a societal one. Should we wait until the Free Markets figure out an advantage for business in heaving a healthier society, leave it to parents to properly feed and teach discipline to their kids, or can the government intercede and pass laws such as was done in San Francisco where “Happy Meals”, and others fast foods marketed to children, need to have a minimum nutritional value? I don’t know. There are many good arguments on either side. Not the least is the degree to which we should allow the government to interfere in our lives. I believe driving a motorcycle without a helmet should be someone’s choice. Though it costs a great deal to society, if they don’t value their life and well being, so be it. But a child cannot make that choice.

Efficiency and Unemployment

Around 35 years ago I attended a seminar presented by Deming, the father of statistical quality control and a major contributor to Japans technological resurgence in the middle of last century. He commented on automation saying that the only times automation is justified is when there is a shortage of labor or where the mechanical motions create a superior product. His argument was that if there is no shortage of labor then automation puts workers into the unemployment lines and they have to be paid anyway.

Last week we elected a conservative House and moved the Senate more to the right. They made promises of austerity and fiscal responsibility promising to cut non-defense discretionary spending by 22%. The Democrats, not to be outdone, will most likely focus on cutting the defense budget. I believe that during a severe and potentially protracted recession, both are dangerous.

Whenever there is an economic slowdown enterprises take the opportunity to streamline their operations, thus improving efficiency. This is natural. Companies with shrinking demands, have the need to lower costs and more time available to focus on improving operations along with a workforce more willing to work harder which in better times it might not. So what happens is that, with excess labor already in the market because of the slowdown, this improvement puts more people into the pool of unemployed. To further aggravate the situation, the politicians react to voters concern about the cost of government and promise to cut costs by cutting programs, eliminating waste and improving efficiency. All these, if successful, further increase unemployment whether directly by cutting staff or indirectly by reducing consumption of material which still boils down to cutting labor somewhere.

We have gotten out of previous economic downturns by waiting things out until demand picks up and the pool of unemployed starts shrinking. We also have been blessed with a slow and somewhat ineffective Congress. So by the time they get around to really cutting costs and reducing waste (improving efficiency) as promised, the recession is over and things are back to normal. The potential risk I see is that this downturn is more severe and different than previous ones and with both parties starting to campaign for the 2012 elections and the electorate drifting to the right, they will have the vigor and the time to start fulfilling their promises before we are out of the hole and extend the period before recovery or even worsen the situation driving us into a depression.

If the number of unemployed rises dramatically for whatever reason, we will be faced with a few choices. Ignore them and face the threat of civil unrest and possibility of either an extreme left of right wing tyrannical dictatorship or we can help them by raising taxes on those not struggling as much or borrowing and printing money. Another option, if the demand for private sector goods and services does not improve quickly, create demand for labor through government intervention and though it sounds counterintuitive, allow the waste and inefficiency to continue until there is strong evidence of an impending recovery. Someone working at 50% efficiency will still be contributing more than they will on the unemployment or bread line. The private sector, driven by self-interest cannot ignore waste but a government working for the common good can.

Something that is even a harder sell relates to the defense budget. The above arguments also hold true for defense. If there was a sudden peace and all troops came home and were demobilized and we stopped producing armaments, not only the troops, but the workers in the defense industries would enter the already surplus labor pool, greatly expanding the ranks of the unemployed. Though we want to reduce and eliminate the casualties of war as soon as practical, during a downturn, reducing military activities will add to and prolong the economic downturn. Maybe we can reduce the fighting but not military activity until we are back on our feet.

“Big Republican gains presage a nasty period of gridlock for Obama” says the November 6th issue of The Economist. In the final analysis, the electorate, unwittingly may have done the right thing by seating a congress that will ensure a complete grid lock, making it impossible to do anything of any consequence when it comes to eliminating waste and cutting costs and maybe only work together on less contentious and more important issues that address the structural readjustment necessary like education, energy, macroeconomics and our relationship with and economic pressure from the rest of the world.

Globalization, Free Markets and the Plight of the US Middle Class

Over the last three decade, though the average earning of the US population has been going up the middle class has at best stayed stagnant. There have been more trinkets to buy, more pressure to buy them and less money to buy them with. I don’t know to what extent the growth in credit is attributable to this but I can’t help think that at least to some extent it has. The promise of a better future for the middle class has been shattered. This stagnation has been aggravated by the fact that, the already wealthy have been getting wealthier and since material well-being is relative, the middle class in that sense has been moving backward. In the 50s, at the height of prosperity for the middle class in America, a family with the man of the house working in a “blue collar” job could live comfortably, send their kids to college and, if really frugal, have a small cottage on a lake. To do the same today it takes both the man and woman working and to get the cottage on a lake, it takes two professional incomes. Though politicians have been assigning the blame to each other and reciting talking points, I believe the real cause is a structural and natural consequence of the Free Market at work.

The size of the middle class in the industrialized west, if not shrinking has at best stagnated. Worldwide, however, there has been a significant growth of the middle class along with its buying power. So on a global scale the Free Market has been working for the benefit of society. To reiterate the basic concept behind Free Market Capitalism, the quest for self-interest on the part of individuals, collectively leads to benefit for society. In this case that is what is happening on a global scale. In their quest for maximum gains, businesses have been drawn to regions of lowest cost labor. Support services are moving to India and manufacturing to China. We also see this in this Country. New automobile plants, to avoid wages and benefits derived through union activities in the North, are appearing in the South where, though wages are lower than in the North, they are still better than other wages in the South. The South gains the North looses. When the Free Market works uninterrupted, as discussed in a previous posting, it knows no borders, communities, religions, ethnicities, religions or races. With the exception of the near total meltdown of the financial system, the free market is working well from a global perspective, the middle class is growing, commodity prices are going down and global buying power up and the corporations and their owners in the West as well as the East are growing in size and wealth.

The problem, however, is that from a local, regional and national perspective of the West’s middle class, things are getting worse and the question comes down to whether, how and when do we get back to growing it. Now that the financial system’s bleeding has stopped, the Liaises-fair Free Marketers are content to let the markets sort things out. Riches derived from the East are of no less than value than riches derived from the West. So as long as there are riches there is no need to change. The Market will sort things out. The question is how long will it take, what will be the local effect and the resulting collateral damage.

Is globalization a zero-sum game? For someone to win will someone else have to lose? In other words, will the market increase the wealth of the poor nations at the expense of the rich? Believing prosperity to be a zero-sum game, governments historically have interfered with the market forces through tariffs or other trade restrictions trying to force the use of local resources at either the cost of higher prices to the consumers or profits to the enterprises or both and thus starting trade wars often leading to shooting wars.

Free marketers claim that this migration of jobs is a natural consequence of a free economy and it does not have to be a zero-sum game. I believe the current administration agrees. We have gone through such cycles in the past. An industry starts, faces growing demand and creates opportunities for others to enter. Competition increases, prices drop and there begins a drive to lower costs. The textile industry started in England then moved to New England, then the South and now to all parts of Asia. When computers were invented in Silicon Valley and expanded to the East Coast, some of the old textile mills having stood empty for decades began housing the likes of Digital and Wang and now stand empty again as the manufacturing has moved to Asia.

The world is changing rapidly. Technologies advance faster every year. Financial centers move. Balance of power shifts, all this at an accelerating pace. During these dynamic times it is increasingly important that the markets, guided toward the benefit of our society as a whole, remain free. We need better government that understands the global issues and ensures that the paths to our success as a country and in particular our middle class thrives. In the meantime our electorate is becoming increasingly conservative, wanting to protect what it has if not go back to a time when it felt it had more. The danger is that politicians, in their quest for reelection will succumb to the parochial populist movements and steer a course for “instant gratification” and negate the possibility for maintaining our leadership in the world.

The cycle of innovation starting in the West and in particular in the US, maturity and then migration has worked but can it continue? Will the markets alone support this cycle or is there a role for government to play and if so what is this role. The conservative on the extreme right, represent the “small business” and are working to get legislation to advantage small business while the liberal left pushes for legislation supporting labor. The innovation unfortunately does not come from the small business represented by the Chamber of Commerce; the restaurant owner, beautician shop the plumbing contractor, insurance and real estate broker or the family farmer, nor does it come from the labor unions, banker or broker on Wall Street. It comes from an area that is not represented by either party; the universities and research laboratories in large corporations.

The conservative right is suspicious of the “elite”, the intelligent, the educated the newly rich and particularly the government while the left is leery of the wealthy. But, like it or not, our ability to get our middle class growing again and restoring the American dream depends on these. Government has a very important role to play. There is a difference between the Free Market on aggregate and the individual participants in the market. They are at odds. Whereas the market is pushing to lower profits, the participants look to maximize profits and in so doing try to get around the market wherever possible. An important role of government is to block their paths around the markets thus keeping markets indeed free. The markets by their very nature are global and another key role of the government is to make sure that in all the moving and shaking created by the markets, their constituencies are not disadvantaged. This applies to the national, regional as well as local governments.

Our federal government has contributed greatly to the aforementioned cycle. It has supported research at both the universities and in industry through various programs. It has provided for the education of our young. Much of the innovation, such as the semiconductor and the Internet, has come from development funded for defense. When I was running our Company, in applying for federal funds for development projects supporting defense or space, a key question asked was potential commercialization and without a strong argument for commercialization the probability of funding was greatly diminished. (Recent advances in diapers have come from the NASA space program where much engineering went into developing better urine disposal systems for female astronauts.) Its immigration policies have encouraged migration to the United States from all over the world. The father of our space program was a German Scientist. The government has passed antitrust legislation to prevent the formation of monopolies, which would eliminate competition that drives the need for innovation. It has intervened on behalf of local industries when other governments have tried to circumvent the Free Market through currency manipulation or tariffs. As the world, along with all its technologies, changes so does the role of government, its size and cost. The job of government and its associated cost is minimal in a primitive society. The larger and more advanced a society, the greater the complexity of interactions and thus the greater the benefit from and cost of government.

I hear a lot of rhetoric about “too much government” but none about the proper role of government. I believe that the Free Market does indeed work and coincidently does benefit society as a whole but it does so given that the forces that keep the various self interests from circumventing the market are kept in check. I heard someone say the other day that the Republicans are on the side of business and the Democrats on the side of government. I don’t believe that’s a valid categorization. A cynical way to look at this may be that the Republicans want a government that helps business avoid a Free Market while the Democrats want a government that facilitates labor’s quest to find a way around it. Our society, however, needs a government that keeps the markets free and puts roadblocks in the way of everyone who wants to circumvent them. Whoever promises to “keep jobs from going overseas” essentially is offering some path around a free market. My fear is that an irrational quest to minimize the size of the government without understanding its proper role, will diminish, if not destroy our participation in free markets. We will have stronger paths created for business around the markets during the Republican reigns and greater paths around the market for labor during the Democrats reign. These paths will continue to grow. I also fear that during the diminution of the government’s role funding of development through the military, industry and academia will be reduced. There is talk on the far right of eliminating the Department of Education and either privatizing or turning education over to regional politicians. There is a real danger that we will wind up with not only over 50% of the population in one state not realizing that Hawaii is a State and the President a citizen but 50% of the country. Not only will we not have the manpower to support the required technologies with the ability to innovate but one that will be open to misinformation and manipulation through the mass media by whoever is vying for power.

The hallmark of a third world country is the relative small size of the middle class and the very large gap between the small number of very rich and the large number of very poor. Can we stem the tide pushing us in this direction and what are the obstacles we must overcome? “Patriots” shouting about America’s exceptionallism overlook an area where we have been truly outstanding, our ability to attract and integrate foreigners and their cultures into our society. If innovation is one of the keys to our continued success, and I believe that it is, then we need to continue, if not accelerate, this integration. Frans Johansson in his book the Medici Effect points out that creativity leading to innovation comes when a situation is viewed from different perspectives, disciplines and experiences. Innovation often comes from either an individual schooled in a variety of discipline, exposed to different cultures and having worked in different fields or from teams of individuals with the same variety of experiences. The continuous influx of new points of views has contributed to our innovation and our success. The danger we now face is that, with the xenophobia on the extreme right manifest in the Islamophobia and all the anti immigrant rhetoric, we will strongly discourage if not prevent emigration. We will become a homogeneous society likes of India and China and lose our only long-term advantage, our ability to differentiate through innovation.

Another danger, though I believe or at least hope it is a remote one, is that as the wealth of an ever-shrinking group of individuals grows disproportionately, so does their power and their ability to influence policies that then allow them to gain even more power and wealth. If this is allowed to happen we will slip from a true democracy into an oligarchic regime and become a nation not to dissimilar to many South American Countries where a handful of families essentially rule the nation. Part of the government’s responsibility is keeping markets free and in doing this it had to prevent the situation where a small minority has all the wealth and power and uses this to control the government. The way it has achieved this is by imposing taxes on the transfer of wealth from generation to generation and thus hopefully weakening what would otherwise become powerful dynasties. The threat to the reestablishment of the middle class comes from the right’s assertion that the wealthy are the “job creators” and builders of the nation and heavy tax burdens on them will endanger us all. (If I were a descendent of the Chinese and Irish who died building our railroads or Mohawks building our skyscrapers or slaves working the plantations and all others who not only have toiled but died in the process of building this great nation, not to mention lost their lives defending it, I would not so readily concede the credit for our success to the providers of capitol, though I might be persuaded to share it.) The current mood in the country is fiscal conservatism, which I believe translates into less spending on the needy and lower taxes for the wealthy. The theory is that as the rich get richer everyone benefits because there are jobs created in the process. This has not been born out in the decade sine the last tax cut. The poor got poorer, the rich richer and the middle class still stagnated. I believe if the Right’s goal is uncompromisingly realized, it will accelerate the widening of the gap between the very poor and very wealthy, stifle free markets and accelerate our slide into oligarchy.

Globalization does not have to be a zero-sum game but it needs intervention from a strong, well functioning government driven, not by ideology nor populism, but by the recognition that our country’s true success depends on the state of our middle class and drives to restore it.

Fear

Last night I watched the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on CSPAN. This was essentially a comedy show at the National Plaza attended by about 200,000 and hosted by John Stewart with heavy involvement from Steven Colbert. The central theme was a spoof contest between fear and sanity, and it made me think about something I either heard or read from an ancient Hindu writing about the role of a leader. It basically said that the role of leadership is to make the polity fearless. With so much fear mongering going on today particularly on the right, wouldn’t it be nice if in the next presidential election someone come forward on a platform of eliminating fear.

Many fears are real. In some neighborhoods people are afraid to walk the streets at night while in others kids have to be escorted or take long, roundabout routes to get to school and then be afraid of either being beaten up or shot even there. Fear of being mugged, your home invaded, your identity stolen. There is fear of becoming sick and loosing ones home and having to declare bankruptcy. Fear among all who work for a wage, however large or small, that they will lose their job and, not only the income but also the respect of their family and friends. People running a business are afraid of loosing customers and not being able to pay the bills and the wealthy fear the markets collapsing and loosing their fortunes while the homeless fear not having a place to bed down for the night and an empty stomach. There is fear of racial, gender, ethnic and religious discrimination.

We are afraid of being attacked by terrorists from outside or political extremists from the inside. There is the fear that the thousands of nuclear warheads that were once pointed at us by the Soviet Union will once again return to the same direction and the growing power, both economical and military of China with its billion plus population. Many are afraid of getting embroiled in another war started by North Korea, Iran or Israel. The world will run out of fossil fuel. The climate is changing and the seas will rise and the growing zone will shrink bringing on hunger, war and many other calamities. And there is the fear (or maybe joy) among some Christian fundamentalist that we are in the era of Armageddon.

Then there are more socio-political fears. There is the fear that at some point in time, the majority of the population in the US will no longer be white, that we may lose the right to bear arms, be able to go to the church of our choice and there is the fear of becoming a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, be overrun by Muslims or become a nation of atheists. There is fear that our judiciary will fall under Sharia law and that, Jews will take over the economy and poor African Americans will invade their white neighbors. Many fear too much regulation while others fear liaises-fair Capitalism. Some people are afraid that we are heading toward Socialism or even Communism while others are convinced we are on a dangerous path to becoming a Hitler like fascist state. There are fears that we are too soft in our foreign policy while others fear that Neocon imperialism will strangle us. The middle class fears not being able to providing a better life for children and the homeless not having a place to bed down for the night. Many fear that we are drifting away from the “real” America and others that we are not changing fast enough to keep up with the technological, political and economic changes in the world.

Though I have listed many fears, I could go on for several more pages and still only scratch the surface. Among the fears are well though out and also the totally irrational ones. There are fears that have a high probability of coming to fruition while others, though maybe real and theoretically possible, don’t stand a “snowball’s chance in hell” of being realized. The fears originate from both ends of the political spectrum and many transcend politics, with the underlying causes often understood and sometimes even the solutions. The challenge is to find a leader who can alleviate these fears by promoting policies in the case where the fears are real and of consequence to our society, communicate their absurdity in the case where they are only imagined and putting them in the proper perspective in terms of probability in the case where they are real but insignificant.

Unfortunately fear has become an effective political weapon. The “fear mitigating” leader cannot be an ideolog. Solutions to different problems will most likely be based on different ideological principles. Solutions to how to make the streets safer will be different from how to make us more competitive in the Global Marketplace. Answers to improving the life, realizing dreams and protecting property probably require a touch of Libertarianism, Socialism and bits from everything in between. The “sacred cows” should be the elimination of the fear, the constitution and not the ideology behind the method. If such a leader can rise (I doubt they can by the 2012 election if ever given the complexity of our society and our current political system) not only the country but the world, given our leadership position in it, would be a better place for everyone to live.