Integrity at Scale Blog

Taking Action on America's Behalf

In the 1950s and 60s, the Civil Rights Movement was known both for its principle and its practice.

Its principle was simple, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education.  "Separate but equal," the Court had said, "is inherently unequal."

Its practice was simple as well.  Nonviolent resistance, disciplined by the spirit of Christian love.  Resist the evil, affirm the humanity of those who commit evil.  Demonstrators were drilled in the discipline of nonviolent resistance; no matter the provocation, they were determined not to return hatred with hatred.

Now we face a complex challenge.  America is not a competent nation, and in response to the failures of our time many Americans have become frustrated and angry.  Politicians lash out, even more than they usually do.  The Occupy Wall Street movement has found a way to symbolize a moral judgment, but in itself those efforts won't go far to help America learn the arts of twenty-first century competence.

Let's take a leaf from the civil rights movement.  Let's affirm a principle that's suited for our time.  And let's embrace a practice that can help us learn the arts of civic competence.

The principle?  Competence depends on integrity.  If America embraces integrity at scale, America can become a competent nation.

The practice?  When Americans sit together to wrestle with major issues, make a point of addressing four key questions:

The Stewardship Question - Let's understand the condition of America's core assets.

The Business Model Question - Is it time to redesign this industry's business model?  If so, how?

The Public Policy Question - Is it time to redesign the relevant public policies?

The Small Hat/Large Hat Question - Are we prepared to subordinate special interest demands to the national interest?

Let's embrace the principle.  Integrity at scale is essential to national competence. 

Let's also practice the art of civic competence - good stewardship, good business model redesign, good public policy redesign, and alignment of special interests with the national interest.

These aren't "hard" but they are important disciplines.  It will take practice, practice, and more practice to learn them well and use them properly.  Just as the civil rights movement started small and then awakened a nation, conscientious American today can begin small.  And awaken a nation.

Steven Howard Johnson

How to Create a Competent America

Today’s America is a nation under pressure, its resources pinched, its civic skills dated, its emotions out of focus, its leaders confused. At a time when America’s essential competence is in question, it would be difficult to imagine a more all-sided set of crises. Workforce earnings are stagnant, economic growth is sluggish.  Key industries operate in ways that undermine America’s future – banking, medicine, energy, agriculture, food, public schools – the list is long. America’s discarded computers flood the waste dumps of the third world and poison the children who make their living as scavengers.  Both political parties habitually run deficits in order to reward supporters and win reelection. America’s indebtedness rises and rises.  And what of the Boomer generation retirement surge?  America is anything but ready.  This is a nation adrift, its maneuvering room diminished, its people and its thought leaders disoriented.

When so many parts of a single nation perform poorly, that’s a telling signal. Dr. Edwards Deming, the quality guru, returned again and again to an essential insight, which I expand here only slightly.  We live in a world of systems, and the design by which any system operates counts for a great deal.  In poorly designed systems, even the most well-intentioned will produce mediocre results; in well-designed systems, good people acquire the ability to produce great results.

In other words, America’s failures reflect the pervasiveness of ill-designed systems.  Too many good people working in bad systems, too much failure.

In a democratic republic such as ours, every citizen has a dual role.  Individually we are subject to the nation’s laws, collectively we are sovereign, co-authors of America’s future. This essay invites all its readers to step up to our larger civic role, our co-authoring role.

What ought to capture our attention in this troubled era is that America’s future turns on its talent for good system design.  If as Americans we are sloppy thinkers, we will continue our downhill slide.  But if we bring the right qualities to the task, we can meet the test of twenty-first century competence.  As it happens, twelve steps are essential to our success. 

 

1.  Practice asking good questions.  As humans, we share a common trait.  Our energies are drawn to questions that we understand, not to questions that seem out of reach.  Yet not all questions are of equal importance.  Daily life floods us with small scale issues; if we’re not careful, we quickly find ourselves investing our energies in the pursuit of small goals and ignoring our larger goals.  Small-scale questions are like junk food.  They’re fun to discuss but they have little nutritional value.  When we focus exclusively on the details, we allow the larger questions that affect America’s destiny to be elbowed off the table.  A competent public watches for the nation’s larger questions.  It willingly invests its attention in finding answers to its most important questions.  What is true for individuals is equally valid for nations.  Those who practice asking good questions grow in competence more rapidly than those who don’t.

 

2.  Practice a spirit of optimism.  We are guided by what’s in our hearts.  If we are pessimists, we will achieve less; if we are optimists, we will achieve more.  Optimism is self-fulfilling.  Optimists see America as a nation that values its principles and therefore expect more of themselves and of the nation as a whole.  Optimists ask the good questions because optimists expect to find the good answers. Optimism helps us be more productive. To choose a personal outlook is also to choose an outlook for the nation. Should we choose cynicism, our imaginations will paint bleak portraits of America’s future and our pessimism will be self-fulfilling.  Better that we should choose optimism.

 

3.  Acknowledge the reality of scale – its benefits, its risks, its responsibilities. Modern society is marked by its capacity to produce goods and services at a vast scale.  Its engines of replication have the power to make endless copies of almost anything, a power that often delivers benefits at great scale but always contains the potential for damage at great scale.  In Disney’s Fantasia, its relentless army of marching brooms aptly symbolizes the danger of vast scale run amok. Yes, the benefits of vast scale are obvious in the prowess of companies like Boeing, organizations whose vast capabilities flow from their vast scale.  At the same time, one also sees the damaging consequences of mismanaged scale in the economic meltdown of 2008. Toxic but profitable business practices were replicated so aggressively that it wasn’t long before the global financial system had been brought to its knees.  Scale is a perennial challenge.  Sensible supervision of systems operating at vast scale is a permanent obligation of modern citizens.

 

4.  Be alert to rational irrationality.  Profit-seeking behavior is a rational activity, and if it benefits the common good, society benefits as well.  But profit-seeking behavior in systems that are poorly designed will damage the common good.  Adam Smith was an evidence-based thinker.  Different industries operate by different logic and therefore, in Adam Smith’s view, rules must be written the fit the situation.  Free market rules were often a good choice but not always. New Yorker writer John Cassidy uses the expression rational irrationality to capture situations in which free market principles are inadequate.  In a situation of rational irrationality, individual actors behave rationally, but the overall system behaves irrationally.  The greater the success of its individual firms, the greater the damage society suffers from the misbehavior of the larger system. Opportunities for rational irrationality are repeatedly in every complex society.  The more of it we tolerate in America, the more damage we suffer as a nation.  A competent public recognizes the danger.  It asks the good question, “How are we to shape systems that avoid rational irrationality?”  And then it persists until it has found good answers.

 

5.  Embrace integrity at scale.  As children and teens, we receive moral instruction from our parents. If my behavior has harmful consequences, my parents teach me that I am to accept moral responsibility for those consequences.  They expect me to change my behavior.  If I resist – the teenager’s perennial impulse - I will claim “My friends all do it.”  And I will be instructed to ignore the bad examples set by my friends, and to live my own life by a higher standard.  As good Americans, we learn to take moral responsibility for our personal ehaviors and the consequences they cause.  This is the essence of personal integrity. Much of America works well, at the community level, because so many American reflect these values in their own lives.

Yet it is a curiosity of American life, and a contributing part of today’s national incompetence, that integrity is seldom taken to scale as a guiding norm for America’s major organizations, industries, and sectors.  Too many companies and industries conduct operations at vast scale without regard for the harmful consequences.  Political parties also operate at vast scale and they, too, evade responsibility for the consequences of their actions.  Government agencies are capable of doing the same.  In a modern nation of vast replication powers and vast scale, integrity has to be seamless.  A competent American public will embrace integrity at scale as a vital part of our nation’s future.

 

6.  Recognize society’s dual character – Core Assets and Operating Sectors.  Every society embraces a mix of core assets and equally essential operating sectors.  A competent public understands this.  Think first of our nation’s prized assets – our environmental capital, our human and community capital, our economic capital, and our civic capital.  We value them all, and we know our quality of life flourishes best when our nation’s core assets are healthy.

Think next of our nation’s operating sectors – our industries and businesses, our nonprofits, our government agencies.  In a competent nation, these operating sectors will be vigorous, competent, honorable, and successful. 

Our operating sectors and our core assets continually interact.  Picture the nation as a matrix, if you will, Sectors listed on its left side, Assets arrayed across the top.  Operating sectors fuel themselves with resources acquired from the nation’s store of core assets.  The health of the nation’s asset base is affected, in turn, by the behaviors of the nation’s operating sectors.  When those behaviors are responsible, the consequences are beneficial; when those behaviors are irresponsible, America’s core assets go into decline.

This is a perennial fact of life, one that creates complementary civic responsibilities.  As a civic people, we share stewardship responsibilities for the well-being of society’s core assets; as a people, we also share civic responsibility for the professionalism, vigor, and success of society’s operating sectors.  When we fulfill both sets of responsibilities, America’s competence rises. On the other hand, when we duck our responsibilities, America’s competence declines.

 

7.  Understand the role of government.  A competent nation understands the role of public policy and appreciates its value.  A sports analogy might help.  Think about professional baseball, not just as a sport but also as an industry.  The game itself is the sport, two teams competing on the field, each striving for victory.  Each team is also a business organization, and collectively the teams comprise the industry.  Baseball cannot function as an industry, though, without a governing body to set the rules within which all the teams are to operate.  Baseball teams play games; the baseball rules committee defines the industry.  It’s a perennial duality.

Industries and companies have a similar duality.  Just as individual teams compete in baseball, individual companies compete in the marketplace. Just as baseball as an industry requires a framework of governing rules, so too for other industries.  Contracts are to be fulfilled.  Financial reports are to be honest.  Hiring decisions are to be color blind and indifferent to gender.  If well-designed, an industry’s governing rules protect its integrity; companies are compelled to compete fairly and responsibly within those rules.  The overall integrity of the system depends on a proper separation of roles – the competitor’s role and the rule-setter’s role. When companies compete in commercial markets, the impulse to cheat never wholly disappears; hence the requirement that the rulemaking role is always to be kept distinct from the competitor’s role.

A competent nation understands this.  It salutes free-market competition within a framework of honorable rules, and it keeps those roles separate.  Government draws the rule-making role; private sector companies draw the competing firms role.

On occasion, powerful political forces conspire to strip government of its essential regulatory role.  At such times, private sector cheaters rewrite the rules, rig the game, and weaken the nation.  America’s chief line of defense against rational irrationality gets beheaded.  A competent public understands this – government is society’s only legitimate tool for assuring both the overall rationality of an industry and the integrity of the competition that takes place within the industry. 

When baseball regulators forget their responsibilities, steroid use spreads from one player to the next.  When voters and elected officials forget government’s rule-making role, rational irrationality takes over.  America’s competence declines and its freedom of maneuver shrivels.  A wise public understands its responsibilities and accepts them.

 

8.  Embrace problem-solving as the essence of citizenship. The parable of the woman with the pie shop has been in circulation for some time now.  For years she had been the best pie maker in town. Whenever she was in the mood to make a pie, she’d make a few extras and give them to her friends.  One day a close friend suggested she open a pie shop.  The woman loved the idea.  Soon she had her own pie shop.  The fame of her wonderful pies spread and sales grew.  She had a ball – for a while.  Then her close friend asked how she was doing. “To tell you the truth,” the woman said, “I’m not enjoying pie-making as much as I used to.  I don’t have any time to myself.”  

“Ah,” said the friend, “I see the problem.  You spend all your time working in the pie shop.  You haven’t set aside time for working on the pie shop.  Learn how to work on the pie shop and you’ll have more time for yourself.”  The pie maker followed her friend’s advice, redesigned the pie shop, and recaptured her sense of joy.

And so it is with citizenship.  It isn’t enough to live in our nation; it must be in our blood that we also work on our nation.  For America to be a competent nation, we the people must learn the arts of problem-solving.  At scale.  For the twenty-first century.

We shall not lack for challenges. Not every business sector is well-designed; some are badly misdirected.  For every good law Washington adopts, it passes two or three bad ones.  There is much to work on.

A competent American public sees itself as a problem-solving public.  We work on the national pie shop, not just in the national pie shop.  We improve our quality of life by improving our competence.  We redesign, we reinvent, we develop a problem-solving discipline.  And in that discipline, we regularly address four essential questions. 

 

9.  Always ask ourselves the stewardship question.  A competent public always looks to the health of its nation’s vital assets.  Which of its assets are doing well?  Which ones are in decline?  Are processes of decline related to industries that practice rational irrationality?  Where?

 

10.  Always ask ourselves the business model question.  A competent public reviews the nation’s major operating sectors and flags those whose business models put the nation at risk.  We approach this work in a problem-solving spirit, saying to ourselves, “There has to be a better way.   Let’s understand why the current business model doesn’t work.  Let’s develop better options, new business models by which this sector could flourish without harming the nation.”

 

11.  Always ask the public policy question.  Whenever we find ourselves redesigning a key industry, we also review the public policy framework within which that industry operates.  Where existing law contributes to the irresponsibility problem, existing law must also be redesigned.  A more competent business model often requires a more competent policy framework.  Good baseball requires good rules;  good business practices also require good rules.  The two go hand in hand, business model wisdom and public policy wisdom.  The public policy question is almost always the same: “How can public policy help this industry practice integrity at scale?”

 

12.  Ask the small hat/large hat question.  In a competent nation, we as citizens regularly ask ourselves the small hat/large hat question.  As individuals, what roles are we called to fill?  Are we meant to be Small Hat Americans, defending special interests at all costs?  Are we meant to be Large Hat Americans as well?  Insisting that the national interest has to be served first, and that special interests have to subordinate themselves to the national interest?  It’s easy to be a Small Hat American.  It’s not so easy to be a Large Hat American.  It’s a vital matter for popular culture.  Which role is an American citizen’s proper role? 

 

Twelve recommendations for establishing American competence – let’s test their value by imagining the reverse:

1) Imagine an America that always asks the trivial questions and never asks the hard questions. 

2) Imagine an America that embraces pessimism – not optimism – as its cultural norm. 

3)  Imagine an American public that ignores the vast scale and vast risks of modern society. 

4) Imagine an America that accepts rational irrationality as a permanent way of life, that’s indifferent to the damage it causes.

5) Imagine an America that rejects integrity as an important standard for institutions of vast scale. 

6) Imagine an America that doesn’t understand the continuing interaction between its operating sectors and its vital assets.

7) Imagine an America that wants to abandon government’s rule-making responsibilities. 

8) Imagine a democracy whose citizens know how to work in the nation but have no idea how to work on the nation.  

9) Imagine an America that ignores its stewardship responsibilities toward its human, environmental, civic, and economic capital.

10) Imagine an America whose business models for industry are often badly chosen. 

11) Imagine an America that’s perennially sloppy about public policy. 

12) Imagine a United States whose citizens never see themselves as Large Hat Americans. 

Is that an America we would want?  Is that an America that would generate the competence we require?  No.  That’s a vision of an all-points failure.  It would create a system of vast incompetence, within which good people would almost always achieve bad results.  That’s not who we are, it’s not what we want.  We love America.  We want our nation to thrive.

In the short run, the quest for system-by-system competence will stretch muscles we haven’t used in some time.  In the long run, our capabilities will grow and our efforts will be rewarded many times over.  Let’s internalize the Deming principle and use it as our guide.  Great systems help good people achieve great results. 

“Fine,” one may say, “but how does one initiate this work?” There is a logical starting place – the working conference.  Working conferences occur everywhere.  One might be an event inside a single company; another might be an industry event; a third might invite participants from many different companies and non-profits. Most of us know the genre.  Think of any conference you’ve recently attended, or expect to attend sometime in the next year.  In your imagination, redesign that event so that it asks the four closing questions – the stewardship question, the business model question, the public policy question, the small hat/large hat question.  It’d be a valuable shift, wouldn’t it?

A good conference is a perfect setting in which to plant the seeds of national competence.  Let’s try it.  One or two conferences at first.  Then ten or twenty.  The potential is extraordinary.

We Americans are a good people, but we live today in a nation that tolerates faulty system design.  With the nation’s competence slipping, it’s clearly time for a game-changing shift.  It is time to create smarter systems; it is time to bring out the full potential of the American people; it is time to create more competent nation.

 

Steven Howard Johnson

Thoughts on an Environmental Capital Balance Sheet

Catherine Chong has written, in response to the chapter sketching an Environmental Capital Balance Sheet, as follows:  "On the balance sheet formula & definition. I'm wondering, should 'assets' be the benefits of the performance, 'liabilities' as you say the performance in poor health, and 'shareholders equity' be the investment in cash and in human capital...?"

Thanks, Catherine, for your question.  Let me suggest the following way of seeing the overall situation.  There's an environmental asset - a forest, say.  And there's an operating business whose activities affect the asset.  A tree harvesting company, say, that sells trees to the paper industry.  Most have agreed that the forest has to be sustainably managed.  At a minimum, it needs to produce just as much wood per year a century from now as it does today.  Better still, the ecosystems of the forest need to be as healthy in a century as they are now.

The company has a mixed record.  Where its performance has been good, the forest will be in good shape.  Where its performance has been poor, the forest will be in unsatisfactory condition.  And it will have invested resources in forest management, maybe a modest amount, maybe a significant amount.  In the world of Corporate Social Responsibility, that company may well track itself with indicators that suggest good performance here, weak performance there, and some sort of dollars and cents measure of what it has put into the forest.  Those would be ways of measuring the company's strong points and weak points.

But let's think boldly of the forest as a timeless asset, an environmental feature that has been present for centuries or even millennia, one that we would hope to preserve for all future generations.  We are its stewards, whether we make a living from its resources or not.

On an environmental balance sheet, therefore, we would want to capture the quality of the forest in biological or ecological terms, not in corporate terms. 

The overall perspective is one of lasting sustainability.  An environmental scientist might look at size.  Still as big as always?  Or smaller?  What's the trend?  Smaller but stable?  Smaller and still shrinking?  Smaller but recovering in size?  The same scientist might look at biodiversity.  Rich?  Weakened?  Impoverished?  And at the trends.  Biodiversity gaining?  Or losing? 

In the instance we have imagined, these characteristics will be "consequences" of the forest harvester's behaviors, but the quality of the asset is worth measuring, irrespective of the presence or absence of a forest products company. 

So an asset measurement probably shouldn't reflect "performance," in a corporate indicator sense.  Instead, it would be best if asset measurement were to reflect the ecological quality of the forest, both in the moment, and over time. 

I know that such a measurement is best if based on agreement among all those who would measure forest quality, anywhere in the world.  A common standard always helps.

Having a shared standard would give the process of asset measurement greater standing.  The measurement will arise from a process somewhat like this:  Think of the forest biologist looking at a forest, and measuring its well-being.  Think of him, or her, having a metric by which its well-being can be characterized, rather like blood pressure and temperature and cholesterol levels and weight and so on for human beings.

Those aspects of the forest that meet a quality standard will be reported as healthy.  Those aspects that fall short will be reported as unhealthy, in some form or another. 

All features of the forest are listed on the Asset side of the balance sheet; all of them receive some sort of point in time value scoring that roughly reflects good condition or poor,  As the years go by, these reports will also reflect trends. 

On the Liabilities and Equities side of the balance sheet, features of the forest that are in good shape are properly considered as Equities.  They are part of the permanent inheritance of the generations.  Features that are in poor and declining condition are properly considered as Liabilities.  It will take a big boost from humans to get them back on track.  We wouldn't measure Liabilities in dollars and cents terms, probably, but we would still want to acknowledge that this particular balance sheet has some important Liabilities on it.

As a reminder.  The framework of the book is built around the simple idea that society comprises both a broad mix of assets, and a broad mix of operating sectors.  With respect to society's assets, we are stewards of their well-being.  With respect to society's operating businesses and sectors, we are champions of entrepreneurial success. 

With respect to both together, we are champions of corporate social responsibility, companies succeeding in the marketplace, and doing so in a way that preserves the quality of society's core assets.  Our business measures tend to be known as "indicators;" the measures we create to track asset health are better kept within the broad framework of "Assets" and "Equities" and "Liabilities."

Steven Howard Johnson

 

 

 

 

What "The Wire" Tries To Do

My wife and I are Netflix fans.  We had been told some time ago we had to watch The Wire, available in all five HBO seasons from Netflix; finally we took heed, and once we got started, we were hooked.  We watched the final episode last night, then the DVD commentary.  It's a brilliant study of urban decay and urban corruption, brilliant in its characters and their realism, brilliant in the realism of how various subcultures behave.  Baltimore is the setting, the backdrop, and an ever-present character.  Its urban decay is stark; its social dilemmas profound.

In the final commentary, creator David Simon expresses the wish that the show might somehow make a difference, partly in the world of journalism, and partly in the larger way the city runs.  It's a heartfelt wish.  He really doesn't care for the behaviors of the urban world that his series mirrors so well; he wants something better.  But where might  this come from?  Can it come from the daily newspaper as it used to be, an honorable civic institution?  Can it come from the sort of politics his series portrays?

I don't think so.  Newspapers at their best can tell daily stories about urban problems.  They cannot, of themselves, create the social change that their cities need.  Urban health takes something more than a spirit of knowing and fixing problems.  It also takes a spirit of "creating success." 

When we're trying to create success, we ask ourselves different (and better) questions:  "What else can I add?"  "What else can I do right?"  "Who else can be part of the solution?"  "Are there additional success factors that we haven't yet thought of?"  "What do we know about best practices?  Who can we copy?" 

That's our challenge now.  Imagine ourselves not just as problem solvers but as success creators.  Take integrity at scale as our standard and imagine cities of tomorrow that live by that shared standard.  It'd be a nice way to honor all those who created The Wire.   

Steven Howard Johnson

What I Have, What I Am

If am sick with a mild virus, then "I have a cold."  If my shoulder is sore, "I have a sore shoulder." 

But suppose I have grown up in America.  What will I say then?  Any chance I'll say "I have an American upbringing"?  Not very great.  Most likely it will be this:  "I am an American."     

Suppose my good friend views me as a neurotic person.   Will he say of me, "he  has a neurosis" or will he say "he is a neurotic"?  Either is possible.   Suppose I have a conservative point of view.  Will my friend say, "he has conservative views" or will he say "he is a conservative"?  Who knows?  Each is possible.

Suppose I attend my local Presbyterian church.  Will my friend say, "he has Christian views" or will he say "he is a Christian."  He could say either one.

Suppose I own waterfront property.  Once a forested area sat between me and the bay.  When it rained, the forest filtered the rainfall and prevented torrents of sediment from gushing into the bay. Now I raze the forest.  I replace it with a tennis court and a lawn.  Today's rainfalls are no longer filtered as they used to be.  Will it be said that "I practice polluting behaviors"?  Or that "I am a polluter"?  

Who am I?  Am I my illness?  Am I my neurosis?  Am I my political views?  Am I my church membership?  Am I my behaviors?  (mis)behaviors as a homeowner?  Am I my virtues?  Am I my vices? 

At a recent wedding, the father of the groom offered a toast.  Not to the bride and groom.  To himself.  And to his wealth, his power, and his pride.   What shall we say of the father?  Is arrogance "something he has" or is arrogance "who he is"?

Aristotle took this on.  Human beings are naturally creatures of passion.  Some passions are beneficial, some are damaging.  Civilization depends on its members developing a sense of character.  We develop virtues so that we can hold our damaging passions in check.  We develop virtues so that our civilization can rest on a foundation of good character, not on a foundation of perpetual vice.  In Aristotle's view, "I am my sense of virtue," and sometimes "I am gripped by passions that violate my character."  Who I am, what I have - it's a vital distinction. 

Religious faith has a similar potential.  Religion can teach us respect for ourselves, for our families and neighbors, and for distant brothers and sisters in faith whom we have never met.  It can teach us compassion toward total strangers, regardless of their faith.  It can create a sense of faith-based character that keeps us in touch with the divine and in touch with our own capacities for virtue.

"American character."  Is it something one has?  Or is it central to who one is?  And if it is central to who we are, is it a source of vice?  Or is it a source of integrity? 

Aristotle's teachings were wise.  Religious faith lifts our sights.  As Americans, yes, we have many vices.  But who are we?  What lies at the heart of our identity as Americans?

Steven Howard Johnson

 

 

Gerrymandering: Why It Matters

A 1964 Supreme Court decision - Wesberry v Sanders - touched off modern gerrymandering.  The Court held that all congressional districts in a state must be of equal population.  By an old custom, the power to redraw district lines had long been assigned to state legislatures.   Now, by a new custom, state legislatures corrupt our democracy a little further after each new census by indulging themselves in new bouts of gerrymandering.

Here's the Receipts and Outlays graph from Chapter 18 that illustrates the damage caused to the federal budget.

A long string of Congresses, from 1947 through 1970, demonstrated exemplary fiscal discipline.  Eight surpluses.  Only two years in which the deficit exceeded 2% of GDP.  Gross federal debt in 1947 had been well above 100% of GDP; by 1970 it had fallen to 36% of GDP.   

Fiscal behavior changes in the 1970s, following the first round of legislative gerrymandering.  Outlays regularly exceed receipts.  Surpluses disappear.  Deficits increase, cautiously at first, then more dramatically.  Then, in the 1980s, following the second round of post-census gerrymandering, deficit spending accelerates.  There was a pause during the Clinton presidency, with higher tax rates, contained federal spending, exceptionally high stock prices, and a momentary surge in capital gain tax collections.  It didn't last.  With George W. Bush as president, Congress once again slashed tax rates and resumed its deficit-spending ways.

In the forty years from 1971 through 2010, Congress ran only four surpluses.  Twenty-eight deficits exceeded 2% of GDP.  Of those, 18 exceeded 3% of GDP.  Gross federal debt shot back up. 

People wonder where the debt crisis comes from.  The single largest reason for the debt crisis is modern gerrymandering.  Gerrymandering discriminates in favor of the nation's ideologues and against the nation's moderates.  Once the nation elected fiscally responsible Congresses; now the nation elects fiscally irresponsible Congresses.        

In a genuine democracy, voting districts aren't rigged.  Candidates face voters of every persuasion.  The center has the voice it deserves, and the nation is the better for it.  In a gerrymandered democracy, district-rigging is pervasive.  The center is disempowered and the two-party duopoly takes over.   Congress loses its wisest and most temperate voices.  Gerrymandering is a civic poison.  A competent America would shed itself of gerrymandering at the earliest possible opportunity.

Steven Howard Johnson

Gerrymandering: A Strategy for Ending It

"The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States . . . ."  This phrase from Article I, Section 2, captures the essence of America's democratic tradition.  "Members" of the House of Representatives are to be "chosen . . . by the People of the several States."  

Modern gerrymandering stands this principle on its head.  Instead of the people choosing the representatives they want, each state's dominant party uses its boundary-drawing power to choose the voters it wants.  This reverses the intent of the Constitution. 

It's time to put together a well-drawn constitutional challenge.  Find people with standing.  Find a great team of lawyers and well-heeled sponsors.  Draw up the best possible case and take it to court. 

Modern gerrymandering was set loose on the land as the collateral damage that flowed from Reynolds v Sims and Wesberry v Sanders in the 1960s.  Those decisions were right, on their merits, but they also created a damaging mess that can only be undone by another Supreme Court decision, one that outlaws the practice of allowing legislators to choose their voters.

Steven Howard Johnson

 

 

Redesign: The Next Revolution

The Scientific Revolution, the Democratic Revolution, the Free Market Revolution, the Social Revolution, the Environmental Revolution, the Computer Revolution.  Our history books capture broad shifts in human history with simple phrases.  Once human society didn't have the scientific method; now it does.  Once monarchy was the norm; today's standard is the democratic republic.  Markets once were shaped by royal charters; market freedom is now the norm.  Once slavery was acceptable and only men had the vote; now women also have the vote and slavery has been outlawed.  Once we ignored the environment entirely; now we have laws that give the environment some protection.  Once we struggled along with typewriters and libraries where knowledge was stored in books and catalogued by card files; now we have computers and servers and broadband and search engines and social media and countless websites.

Are we done?  No.  The revolution that awaits is the Redesign Revolution.  A competent civilization knows when major ways of doing business no longer works.  It redesigns its business practices and its public policies; it rethinks its popular culture and its spirit of stewardship.  It refreshes itself by redesigning major institutions that have become corrupt.  It saves what it needs and casts aside the corruption.   

We are in the early stages yet of redesigning the energy industry.  Fossil fuels have been discredited as an energy source for the future by the terrible damage they cause; new tools for capturing and distributing and using energy are being tested in laboratories all over the world. 

At an even more sweeping level, we are in the early stages of redesigning human activity in order to comply with Nature's iron laws of sustainability.  Succeed in this quest and human civilization will enjoy an unlimited ride on planet Earth. 

Economic life in the modern world continues to be driven by the idea that prosperity requires growth.  If growth stops, prosperity stops.  Yet endless growth is incompatible with sustainability.  What we need, for a healthy future, is a world of post-growth prosperity.  How are we to do that?  We don't know.  Yet.  But we need to figure it out, and it's one of the major parts of the Redesign Revolution to come.   

And what of Gated Capitalism?  Its practices trap the bottom seventy percent in poverty so that the top one percent can acquire virtually unlimited wealth.  Gated Capitalism lusts after endless growth and an endless expansion of wealth.  It is a human conceit of catastrophic biblical proportions.  Capitalist wealth has a legitimate role, but taken to excess, the drive for wealth becomes terribly destructive.  Capitalism needs to be redesigned so that the practice of Gated Capitalism can be left behind. 

Today's toxic Congress is the product of modern gerrymandering.  In an honorable democracy, voters choose their legislators.  In today's gerrymandered America, legislators choose their voters.  Today's Congress is filled with partisand from the right and the left.  The national interest has no voice.  Huge redesign challenge here as well. 

The same basic principles underlies all these examples.  A bad design creates a bad system; a good design creates a good system.  In a bad system, special interests are rewarded; the national interest is ignored.  In a good system, the national interest is protected and special interests are required to behave responsibly. 

Badly designed systems have been characterized by journalist John Cassidy as examples of "Rational irrationality."  Each piece in a badly-designed system seems rational to the special interests who profit from it, yet the system as a whole is irrational.  The greater the profit for the special interests, the greater the damage for the nation.

Rational irrationality is a pervasive problem, one that will recur again and again.  Integrity at scale is always the better answer.  A competent modern society uses large scale redesign as a tool for protecting itself from rational irrationality.   The Redesign Revolution awaits.

Steven Howard Johnson

 

 

 

Prosperity without growth?

Growth.  It is the essence of an industrial civilization, is it not?  Coal gave us ironworking and steelmaking.  Steel gave us railroads, and engines and trains, skyscrapers, and the capacity to create turbines and generators.  Generators gave us electricity.  In time, electricity gave us computers and the internet.  We added highways and suburban homes and refrigerators and freezers and washer-dryers and television and two car families, or is it three car families?  Medicine became more high tech, and then even more. 

It was through growth that the United States enjoyed such a vast surge in prosperity from the late 1940s into the mid-1970s.  Of course, growth has been our norm from the very beginning, when the first English settlers landed in the New World.  Initially there were but a few dozen settlers.  By 1776, there were three or four million.  Now we number 310 million and counting.  Growth is our thing.  We grow in numbers, inventions, and technologies; we expand the range of our industry, the amount of land we occupy, the financial wealth at our disposal.  We grow in longevity.  Growth as a way of life is deeply ingrained.  We are Americans; we are a people committed to growth, a people committed to prosperity.  We cannot imagine being an America without growth; we cannot imagine prospering economically without growth.

What if we're wrong?  That is to say, what if we're no longer right?  In his new book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama notes the tendency of powerful civilizations to institutionalize the practices that made them successful.  When conditions change, their inertial momentum is strong and they refuse to adapt.  They cling to old habits and because yesterday's habits no longer fit, civilizations go into decline. 

So it is with our habits of growth.  Growth is one of those civilizational behaviors that acquires great inertial momentum.  We will imagine ourselves defined by growth for years or decades too long.  

The Earth is finite - finite in size, finite in resources, finite in its carrying capacity.  The era of endless growth is very close to the end of its run.   Peak oil is here; peak everything else seems to be here as well.  We can't dig stuff up and pump stuff out and consume it and throw it away, endlessly; we especially can't do that on an ever-rising exponential growth curve.  It's a hard truth to face, but in our hearts we know we weren't placed on the Earth simply to liquidate its resources and exterminate its living species.   The Earth is not a throwaway resource.  That's not the bargain the Creator cuts with any species.   

So here's a new phrase.  "Post-Growth Prosperity."  Growth isn't a permanent necessity.  Even without perpetual growth, America can always be a prosperous nation.  The American people can always be a prosperous people.  If we change the way we do business, if we change our ideas, we can learn how give ourselves a perpetually prosperous future.  Without growth.  It will be a huge change in habits.  Hard as all get out.  Hard, but for the better. 

Steven Howard Johnson