– I wrote my friend, Kim, who sent me this article, and said,
“If some of us survive to write history in the future, it will make interesting reading looking back on America during these times. I expect that many of us (and certainly most Americans) are simply too close now to the situation to see it from a lofty post-event historical perspective but I, sometimes, can imagine what that history book will read like.”
– We are truly embedded in our lives like those long-ago bugs trapped in amber. Our 60 to 80 years and our short attention spans just don’t let us get a historical perspective on the times we are living in. Oh, we can pick up history books and read about, say, Italy in the Renaissance or some other time and place and feel a lofty sense of understanding as we read and fly above all of their lives and times. But for our here and nows we are too close to the forest to see anything but the trees of our daily rounds.
– In the relatively new scientific area of Complexity, there’s an idea that I’ve found to be very persuasive. It deals with Emergent Properties. I think it’s a good way to think about what’s wrong with our species and its civilization.
– In a nutshell, it is the idea that many small and relatively simple units acting together can produce something complex that you could never have predicted from just studying the simple units themselves in isolation. And this something complex that arises does so because of the interactions of the many simple units and what arises is called an Emergent Property.
– A bee colony is a good example. You could study the intelligence and the behaviors of individual bees forever and never be able to predict bee hives.
– A snowflake is another. You could study the properties of a water molecule for a long, long time and never predict the organizational beauty of snowflakes.
– I won’t belabor the point. If you are curious, follow either or both of the links, above.
– My point is that we humans are simple units that just want what is best for us and our families.
– We want food, warmth, physical security and love. Everyone that works, start a business, save for college, loves their child is looking out for themselves and those they love.
– In isolation, and considering all of us one by one, this is all good.
– But in our world, some get very rich and want more. Some are security conscious and they seek power to protect themselves and they go too far.
– All of us in our billions are loose in this world looking out for ourselves. The big oil corporations, the folks that own Wal-Mart, and the dictator running Syria. They are all just like us – but writ large.
– Read the article, below, and see ‘us’, all of us, just looking out for ourselves there. The beggars, the CEO’s, the small businessmen and women and the war lords all sharing this stage together.
– There are more and more of us all the time.
– And all of us want more and more for ourselves and our families.
– We are like locusts sweeping along. Every year, there are more of us but the planet and its resources just remain the same size as they were in the beginning.
– We simply can’t have continuous growth in a planet of fixed size.
– It’s not just my opinion – it’s simple and unavoidable physical logic.
– We can’t all keep wanting more for ourselves. In there end, there will only be so much and then, after that, we will all be facing a big disappointment.
– Though in truth, many of the smartest among us have seen these limits approaching now and they’ve begun to collect their wagons into circles to protect themselves. The rich and the powerful are getting richer and more powerful as a bulwark against the coming shortages, and, while they do this, they are telling the rest of us that things are going to be fine.
– They are not, my friends. They are not going to be fine.
– Global changes of unimaginable size are coming in the next few decades. The evidence is lying all around you. Don’t let yourself be seduced by the “Things are going to be fine” messages. Think about what’s going on and where you want to end up when the wheels begin to come off.
– For those of you in America, this article should be a wakeup call though I know most of you will keep on sleeping.
– Remember those few wise Jews that left Germany just as the anti-Jewish hysteria was beginning? And remember the fates of those Jews who didn’t believe that such changes were coming? They didn’t believe that such things could happen.
– dennis
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If America needed a reminder that it is fast becoming a second-rate nation, and that every economic policy of the Republican Party is wrongheaded, it got one this week with the release of the Social Progress Index (SPI).
Harvard business professor Michael E. Porter, who earlier developed the Global Competitiveness Report, designed the SPI. A new way to look at the success of countries, the SPI studies 132 nations and evaluates 54 social and environmental indicators for each country that matter to real people. Rather than measuring a country’s success by its per capita GDP, the index is based on an array of data reflecting suicide, ecosystem sustainability, property rights, access to healthcare and education, gender equality, attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, religious freedom, nutrition, infrastructure and more.
The index measures the livability of each country. People everywhere depend on and care about similar things. “We all need clean water. We all want to feel safe and live without fear. People everywhere want to get an education and improve their lives,” says Porter. But economic growth alone doesn’t guarantee these things.
While the U.S. enjoys the second highest per capita GDP of $45,336, it ranks in an underperforming 16th place overall. It gets worse. The U.S. ranks 70th in health, 69th in ecosystem sustainability, 39th in basic education, 34th in access to water and sanitation and 31st in personal safety.
More surprising is the fact that despite being the home country of global tech heavyweights Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and so on, the U.S. ranks a disappointing 23rd in access to the Internet. “It’s astonishing that for a country that has Silicon Valley, lack of access to information is a red flag,” notes Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress Imperative, which oversees the index.
If this index is an affront to your jingoistic sensibilities, the U.S. remains in first place for the number of incarcerated citizens per capita, adult onset diabetes and for believing in angels.
New Zealand is ranked in first place in social progress. Interestingly, it ranks only 25th on GDP per capita, which means the island of the long white cloud is doing a far better job than America when it comes to meeting the need of its people. In order, the top 10 is rounded out by Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Denmark and Australia.
Unsurprisingly these nations all happen to rank highly in the 2013 U.N. World Happiness Report with Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden among the top five.
So, what of the U.S? In terms of happiness, we rank 17th, trailing neighboring Mexico.
We find ourselves languishing for the very fact we have allowed corporate America to hijack the entire Republican Party, and some parts of the Democratic Party. This influence has bought corporations and the rich a rigged tax code that has redistributed wealth from the middle class to the rich over the course of the past three decades. This lack of shared prosperity and opportunity has retarded our social progress.
America’s rapid descent into impoverished nation status is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. By every measure, we look like a broken banana republic. Not a single U.S. city is included in the world’s top 10 most livable cities. Only one U.S. airport makes the list of the top 100 in the world. Our roads, schools and bridges are falling apart, and our trains — none of them high-speed — are running off their tracks.
With 95 percent of all economic gains funneled to the richest 1 percent over the course of the last decade, and a tax code that has starved the federal government of revenues to invest in public infrastructure, America will be a country divided by those who have and those who have not. In The World As It Is, Chris Hedges writes, “Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods, and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty.”
This week the Republican Party rolled out its 2014 Ryan budget. Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that under the Ryan budget, “[affluent] Americans would do quite well. But for tens of millions of others, the Ryan plan is a path to more adversity.” Greenstein pointed out that the plan would leave millions without health insurance through repeal of the Affordable Care Act and changes to Medicaid funding.
Greenstein also criticized the budget for its impact on anti-poverty programs, estimating that it would slash basic food aid provided by SNAP by at least $135 billion and convert the program to a block grant, make it harder for low-income students to attend college and make massive unspecified cuts to domestic non-military spending, which means cuts to social welfare programs.
The countries ranked highest in social progress are doing the complete opposite. They’re investing in schools rather than drones. They’re expanding collective bargaining laws rather than busting unions. They’re providing their citizens with universal healthcare and education rather than selling these basic human rights to the highest bidder.
“Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly, or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower protofascist movements such as the Christian Right,” observes Hedges.
It’s your move, America.
– research thanks to Kim W.
Dennis, I read this again….real slow.what I cant understand is why the US is doing this….India, a developing nation is doing just d opposite. Right to education, right to food, free hospitals and medicines. A hundred days per year job guarantee..personally it may make us lazy, a lot of us feel. But every budget is doling out more and more populist measures.
Gouri, I think the explanation is that both nations are on different parts of their evolutionary arcs.
The path to political power in India now would seem to be via Populism and doing things for the masses.
That time is past in the U.S. and the power brokers there have realized that for them, at this time and place in the U.S. history, the path to power is through rigging the electoral system and thus controlling the laws that are made which, in turn, allows their enterprises to grow richer and their political power more profound.
Those who want power and wealth always zero in on the weakest point in a system and in these two countries, these are different points at this time.