What is it that is tearing us apart? MONEY!?

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Volume 2, Issue 31

At least it isn’t anything important like hatred — there’s still hope for us then. Obviously money is what has brought the two major political parties into greater animus than I can ever remember existing before.

The Republican Party insists it will not back legislation that adds any tax burden to the rich, but instead wants to close loopholes. Why not do both? Unacceptable, is the hard line taken up front. As if there is something in principle wrong about asking for help from the most able at a time of crisis?

Undoubtedly the hard line rests instead on the idea that swollen government is the main problem so it must be starved.* Or maybe there’s another explanation that would make sense if explained to me.

A long dispute means that both parties are wrong.

— Voltaire

 In our last post we wrote about creative compromise. The kind of creative compromise that we need to make in the tax domain is exactly where we draw the line between “the people with enough money to do more” and “people who make a decent living but whose retirement is by no means certain”.

One nicety that has already come to public awareness is that of small corporations — where the proprietors are filing taxes combining the business with the personal — which makes these individuals appear to be wealthy. There should be a way to word the legislation so that mistake does not happen. Jobs will not be stimulated by heavier taxes on such folks.

Not sure that $250K/year is any kind of magic number that signifies ability to pay more taxes. That’s the top 4.2 percent of taxpayers. However, in our October 25 post I shared the IRS stat that the top 0.1% received 7.8% of all U.S. income in 2009. Maybe we don’t need to come all the way down to include 4.2% of taxpayers to accomplish our goals of deficit reduction and investment in America’s future? Perhaps it can be just 1%, and perhaps we can offer psychological inducements, by encouraging investments as we’ve discussed here many times.

If the government budget contains too much money for people who need that money for survival, we cannot take it away from them — we need to use that money to retrain them, another idea you’ve heard here and elsewhere.

The need to take from the rich and give to the poor is a good idea from the standpoint of making the whole country an even greater success, but only if it is a temporary idea not a way of life.** Hence the importance of training people or even investing in their family business rather than just keeping them on subsistence existence of no value to themselves or others.

Robert A. Heinlein wrote a utopian novel called For Us, The Living  in which he projects a future where the government prints and gives us all the money we need. The idea came from economist C. H. Douglas in the 20’s — he called it Social Credit. When the Depression came it was actually put into being, in 1935, as the economy of Alberta, Canada, with Douglas as the economic advisor. It never had a chance to succeed or fail because it was shut down by the courts — i.e. for ideological reasons, without letting the experiment play out.

Farfetched ideas like this need to be given careful consideration by economists. I invite any economists reading this to post their comments in answer to the following question:

If the U.S. started doing Social Credit and people within the U.S. were fine with giving and taking these dollars from each other so hyperinflation did not occur domestically (though foreign trade would be hard hit), could the country do just fine using only its own resources or what further refinements in such an idea would make it workable and desirable to all?

Sure, I know it sounds like Communism. Heinlein admitted the same but emphasized that it does not stifle individuality the way Communism does. People in his story are independent, do what they want to do with their lives, and tend to wind up not being takers but instead giving greater value to others.

What if we did a test? Only do it as an investment, and only to those people who show a plan of what they intend to do for that money, with a diverse nonpartisan board or Internet voting to decide which plans were worthy of backing. We could budget for a million households as a test of the idea. If people knew they had so high as about a 1 in 100 chance of being selected, a lot of people would be motivated to write plans of what they would do with their time for their own enjoyment and the good of others — if only they had enough money to pay their modest bills. It would focus us all on positive solutions. Since it would be an investment, the money would be repaid in the normal way that investors recoup. If the idea worked, it could be rolled out.

Another crazy idea scenario for economists to play with and form into something workable: forgiving all debt every 50 years starting now. Leviticus in the Bible advises that every 50 years mortgage debt is to be forgiven, which was called a Jubilee Year. Economists could run computer simulations or whatever would provide a trial-and-error feedback mechanism to tinker this advice into potentially workable models.

Again, whatever we do has to be done domestically first (and test-piloted) because the idea of getting the whole world to do something radical with money seems a bit over the top. If the hunch that the U.S. needs to experiment monetarily on its own is right then it has to be built into whatever strategy we creatively and unifyingly come up with in the days ahead. Now is the time for creativity and consensus building, not for naysaying. We are hard up against it.

But we shall prevail.

Best to all,

Bill

*”Starve the beast” was an idea first promulgated by Republicans in the late 70s and 80s. “The beast” refers to welfare, Social Security, and Medicare, and does not usually refer to spending on the military, law enforcement or prisons (per Wikipedia). You might find this Forbes commentary of interest:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/06/tax-cuts-republicans-starve-the-beast-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html

**Although CEO compensation has skyrocketed off the chart while average wages are flat, and this in itself appears to be a prima facie social ill.

Now Is the Time to Heal the Rift in America through Creativity in Compromise

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Volume 2, Issue 30

The election is over and Obama has a second term. Both parties’ base constituencies came out to vote, signifying high motivation that their side must win, which means a lot of people feel they have lost. Some of these people are not going to agree to bring the country back together, yet that is exactly what would be best for everyone as we move forward. It is all about how we handle the situation now.

Romney won among white males and in many States. Obama won the popular vote by about three million votes. In CNN exit polls more people want to repeal Obama’s healthcare program than to keep it, possibly largely based on hearsay, some of it purposeful disinformation. The consensus pattern suggests that Obama’s actions to date should not be predictive of what he aims to do from this point forward. His best move would be to acknowledge the arguments of the other side and seek new creative ways to postulate compromise concepts and action programs that can bring both sides together — enabling processes of refinement of initial concepts, where everyone gets to add creative elements to the final solutions so that everyone can feel parentage.

Romney’s speech in accepting defeat for his bid emphasized the right notions of how America can succeed, calling upon job creators to step forward and invest in growth. That would be the right guideline for the Republican Party in the next four years, and starting instantly, a quick winding down of negativity and a pulling together toward creativity and compromise.

Creativity is in fact the one thing that has still been missing. All we have heard are variations in ancient themes. No inspiring new ideas. Exactly the opposite of what is needed. Look at the world around us — it is full of amazing surprises in technology, lifestyles, new ideas in every field except politics. The American people want creativity in public policy too. Both sides need to retrain themselves to think, stripping back to start from fresh sheets of paper, reinventing themselves anew. Think the unthinkable. Pour out ideas without regard for taking credit, without attachment to seeming smarter than the other guy. We are one team, we have real challenges, and we must together devise the real new solutions that lie just beyond a fictitious barrier of our own making.

The real leaders on both sides are the ones that will propose new, positive and healing compromises in the days ahead.

The President hinted at the value of our dynamic differences in his victory speech, saying that people around the world are fighting and dying in order to gain the right to freely discourse their differences in self-governance. True. However, our political discourse has all too often fallen to name calling, and must be re-elevated to a Socratic dialectic that progresses to a commonly supported synthesis. Respect for those whose views differ from yours is the mother from which invention of new creative re-bonding ideas spring. Lack of such respect is infertile ground for creativity. Do not be put off by the extremists on the side you consider to be the other side, listen to the moderates on the perceived other side for inspiration of your own creative ideas that might succeed in bringing us together. Let the American people share in the creative process and bubble up grassroots ideas for leaders to build upon.

In this spirit of America, we will in the very near future add THE DEMOCRACY CHANNEL to this blog, as an adjacent page on which we seek your ideas for solutions to the challenges faced by the country and the world. We will reach out to academics, think tanks, students, writers, and the general population, and we’ll publish the ideas we feel are truly creative and can potentially heal the rifts we have formed out of our genuinely differing perspectives, ideas that can solve the challenges the human race has created for itself.

Please embrace healing in your own life so that it may radiate out — as from pebbles in a vast pond.

Best to all,

Bill 

PS – Next week the Smart TV Summit is being held in San Francisco with over 150 major names registered so far. I’m speaking on a panel about the future of television and also presenting research relevant to the future. Hope some of you can make it, let’s have a drink too. Cheers, Bill

A Certain Dislocation in Time

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Volume 2, Issue 29

Flow state is within our reach at any moment. Think for a second how small your average challenge is at any given moment in time. Mostly you are not overmatched — if anything there is too little challenge at any given moment to evoke Flow. As Czikszentmihalyi taught us all, Flow can happen when skills and challenges are well matched in the moment. But that single criterion is not enough. Attachment to outcome also has to disappear.

The way almost all of us live our lives in the present culture rarely escapes attachment to outcome. This is the big Flow blocker.

It is the difference between Being and the peculiar form of existence that characterizes the present civilization. Being is when there is no dislocation in time between stimuli and the flow of our actions. We simply do it. We don’t think about how it will impress other people, or even about how it will impress the internalized judge.

The way we grow up and are taught, we inherit an internalized judge that we check with subconsciously before every action we take. This creates a gap, a dislocation, between simply and trustingly flowing with our being vs. the way we normally behave, which first last and always is constantly checking with the internalized judge, scoring ourselves on everything we do.

In situations big and small, unimportant and important, if we can flip off those safeties and simply trust who we are to do the right thing and enjoy ourselves in a non-self-protective and compassionate way, Flow happens.

If there is negativity present within you, this is unsafe to do — “do not try this at home” — first you must process out the negativity before it makes sense to flip off the safeties. Negativity is a great distorter of actions, so you must then edit impulses discriminatingly. Negativity includes any fear, hurts, and even that faint form of negativity we call attachment to outcome.

When on the edge of Flow, slipping in and out of it, and/or in environments in which the situation is changing rapidly so that from moment-to-moment the challenge slope is unpredictably modulating, there is a subtle inner tweaking of the edit dial that can correct for letting too many impulses into action vs. too few — so that the ego-driven impulses get weeded out and the compassionate and un-self-protective ones get through the filter into the consensus reality for sharing.

Wishing you ever more Flow state in your life.

Best to all,

Bill 

Next Time, Let’s Replace Black Box Debates — Four Out-of-the- Box Ideas

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Volume 2, Issue 29

The presidential debates may give us some further insight into the individuals but they tell us nothing really about any plans the candidates and their parties might have. The possibility exists that there might exist only the most superficially developed plans. In this scientific age of computer models — intensive research potential including controlled experimentation, enhancement processes to creativity — our supreme governance techniques appear to be stuck several centuries behind. Would that our government be run the way our best companies and military think tanks are run, making use of the most in-depth plan testing, scenario generation, simulations, wargames, and psychological interventions to strip away mental and emotional blockages. Instead our highest power center still plays out like a student debate in a high school gym. Not only here but around the world.

Whether or not it was right, and regardless of what you may think of Al Gore, at least his An Inconvenient Truth presentation reached a level of comprehensiveness that is lacking in the current debates about solutions for the economy. Shouldn’t each side present its plan in writing to the public, with a full defense against the other side’s criticisms, citing evidence? In the small arena of media research companies, throughout my career I’ve always strived to present the case for my own methodologies using industry evidence and analytics of my own data. Why can’t candidates present the case for their own plans that way?

We are left with the feeling that each side’s plan for the future is a black box reflecting in the end only the original assumptions of each party, i.e. meritocracy (in its worst expressions degenerating into aristocracy) vs. democracy (in its worst expressions degenerating into communism). The only other factor being “Whom do you trust?” This is likely to be answered internally by one’s own bias along party lines, rendering the whole debate process a waste of time. The current candidates exude such reasonability that one is tempted to trust any of them, but how much of that reasonability is simply well-practiced and well-rehearsed good acting? Ultimately the decisions we make as a nation and as a world should be based on the well-defended plans we are choosing among, not merely on the personalities of the front men and front women. We need a plan.

There are still a couple of weeks left in which the candidates should really dig into the details of why they intend to do X, Y and Z. They should show what has worked before, what has not worked, how the contexts have changed since those evidentiary cases, and what their contingency plans are should results deviate from targets by specified dates. Whereas military plans cannot be exposed that way, economic plans can be. That’s Out-of-the-Box Idea #1. Not just debates, but debates after plan presentations. Yes, the plans are on the candidates’ websites, but push would be more effective than pull when the quality of our lives is at stake.

Our Plan For America presented last century focused on individualized education as the key to training Americans to be able to gain and keep jobs in which they could be fulfilled and happy, setting new records for innovation and productivity. Instead of handouts of fish we must train people to fish for themselves, as Charles Kennedy reminded me the other night. Systemic changes are automating jobs into extinction, and so we must all reinvent ourselves at personal and group levels, right up to nations and the planet as a whole. This is a long-range problem with a long-term solution — what do we do to relieve pain right now?

In the Creativity training Richard Zackon and I gave on October 3 at ARF we pointed out that wild ideas are worth throwing out there because they can lead to sounder ideas. So here are three more wild ideas that can be pummeled into realistic ones.

The private sector is the most efficient, so let’s focus on government tax changes and incentives that drive innovations in the private sector and speed up retraining of people out of work. People who have the most money (the top 0.1% or 0.01% for example*) could be offered a choice of higher taxes or the equivalent amount of money invested in the unemployed as entrepreneurs — kind of a pro-social Shark Tank. Before such a plan would start there would be intensive research into who the unemployed are, what talents and defeated aspirations they have had, either through Facebook or something like it. This web-based system would function as a dating service between out-of-work people and rich people. Rich people would help individuals rather than dole out faceless tax dollars. The business plans of the would-be entrepreneurs would be critiqued and improved by the benefactors. If not invested away the same money would simply be taxed away — again, only for the richest 0.1% or 0.01%.

Another process would be incentivizing internships on a massive scale, where the unemployed work for very little in a company where they can learn new skills and maybe get a foot in the door.

We need to consider making it mandatory in our school systems for students to learn a third language — writing computer code.

Let’s encourage the candidates to drop the rote going-through-the-ancient-motions and get on with detailed specific plans that respect our intelligence.

Best to all,

Bill

*As reported in the New Yorker:

  1. The top 0.1% received 7.8% of all U.S. income in 2009, according to the IRS;
  2.  Economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty find that:
    a. The top 1% received 93% of the gains of the 2009-2010 recovery;
    b. The top 0.01% received 37% of the gains of that recovery.