Tag: community

Trends – maybe

“I don’t set trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them.” ~ Dick Clark

In previous posts, I’ve highlighted trends that will likely impact our communities. Dick Clark’s quote is particularly relevant to communities. A community needs to be ready for the trends that are impacting them, or may impact them. If the trend is negative, a community should take action either to minimize the impacts or to be able to rapidly recover. If the trend is positive, the community should be ready to exploit and accentuate it, if possible.

The fly in this ointment is that we sometimes think we see a trend when there may not be one at all. We humans are pattern-seeking animals. We owe our survival as a species to our ability to recognize slight changes in familiar scenes; our ability to recognize strange whispers intruding on the rhythms of our lives.

In this post, I’m going to look at two different potential trends. One of them already seems to be impacting our communities. The second may be real or not. Only time will tell.

Peak Population

According to the United Nations, the rate of growth of the global population peaked at 2.3% in 1963. Since then it has decreased to today’s 0.84%. The UN projects that the global population will peak before the end of the century (~2080) with a very high probability. Recent model developments are indicating that the UN model is very conservative; peak population may well occur decades sooner. The Eurozone, China, Japan and Russia have all already peaked. The African population is set to continue to expand throughout the rest of this century, but not enough to overcome the declining populations elsewhere.

Peak population appears to be driven by two entangled factors. Compared to 1990, women globally are having one less child. In countries with declining populations, the birth rate is simply too small – below the 2.1 births per woman – to maintain the population. In large part this seems to be a consequence of greater prosperity. In richer countries families don’t need childrens’ work to sustain themselves. In richer countries women are more likely to be working. Life expectancies are greater in richer countries.

In fact, life expectancy is increasing globally – the UN predicts that about 1/4 of the world’s population will be 65 or older in 2080. By 2070, people’s longer life spans will result in over hslf of the world’s deaths occurring after the departed has reached age 80 (compared to only 17% in 1990). In the US by 2035, the number of people 65 or older will exceed those 18 and younger.

As the UN points out, the only reason the US has not peaked (and probably won’t) is immigration. Without immigration, the UN projects that the US population would slowly decrease from today’s 340+M to 245M by the end of this century.

An important global consequence of this trend is what it implies about climate change. All of the scenarios built into our climate models assume that global popuation will not peak (at around 10.5 B people) until early in the 22d Century. Fewer people mean fewer emissions. Thus, adjusting these models to account for fewer people may drastically alter the expected climate impacts.

In the US, the consequences of this trend will vary greatly depending on the community. Communities that rely on exports to Eurpoe for their economic vitality may find that their markets are shrinking due to the decreasing population. Competition for these markets is already intensifying. However, the growth that will occur in the developing world, particularly Africa, in the next decades means that there may be new markets to exploit.

Communities that do not have a significant immmigrant population may stop growing or even contract. Longer life spans are already increasing the demand for elder services (pet care is an interesting example); these communities may not have enough people with appropriate skills to satisfy that demand. These communities may also start to hemorrhage higher paying jobs. Companies requiring a technologically adept workforce may leave because of a lack of skilled workers.

In fact, the Peak Population implies that human capital will be at a premium. We are already seeing this in a decline in the ratio of those employed to job openings – now less than 1. A part of this is the Baby Boomer generation leaving the workforce. This increased demand for workers implies that wage-induced inflation is likely to persist.

However, this does not necessarily mean that our economy will decline. Gross Domestic Product is the working population multiplied by their productivity. If AI is able to increase productivity enough, our economy may even thrive.

As we’re already seeing in our stores, immigrants bring with them a demand for products we have seldom encountered before – food, fashion, and entertainment. They also potentially bring with them severe demands for community services – schools, medical facilities, transportation and welfare. While our new President may be able to stem the flow of immigrants, he won’t be able to stop it.

Peak Population will likely have a significant impact on Higher Education. The declining number of students will place great pressure on colleges and universities to survive. This will place a premium on their reputations and “branding.” Institutions of Higher Education likely will begin to react more forcefully to acts of student hooliganism.

Other possible consequences:

  • Greater demand for workers may well mean greater career volatility as workers go after a wider universe of opportunity.
  • As the well-to-do elderly die or dowsize, there is likely to be a glut of McMansions in some communities. This should drive prices down so that middle class families can afford them, but this will have impacts on the tax base of local governments and schools.
  • Immigration into the US, is already impacting the country culturally and socially. Peak Population is likely to accentuate these impacts, both positive or negative.

The 2024 election and political realignment

We’ve had entirely too much theorizing over what our election meant or didn’t mean. Four things stick out to me:

  • Trump got slightly more votes than in 2020, meaning he got about the same proportion of the electorate in 2024 as in 2020 .
  • Much of the theorizing (scapegoating?) revolves around percentages, not the absolute number of votes. Since the total number of votes cast in 2024 was well below that of 2020, Trump’s percentage of the total vote was bound to be higher.
  • Trump’s coalition (his mix of the voters) changed. He picked up more votes from blacks, hispanics, and blue collar workers than before. Conversely, his proportion of white votes went down slightly, continuing a larger trend.
  • Harris got 10 M less votes than Biden. She ran an abysmal campaign, and was a worse campaigner. A lot of Dems just stayed home on election day. The telling stat – to me – is that Harris was unable to get out as much of the urban Dem vote as Biden did. She reached only 80% of Biden’s total in Chicago (Cook County) and Philadelphia, and 75% in New York (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens).

All of this suggests that the demise of the Dem Party has been greatly exaggerated. Ultimately you have to give people “a reason to believe.” The Veep never did. Had Biden withdrawn sooner so that the Dems could have had a more “primary-hardened” candidate, they might have won.

Is there a trend toward political realignment of our country? A certain – “maybe.” Definitive conclusions about party realignment will have to wait for more detailed analysis of the absolute vote totals. I suspect that it will be a definite “Yes” in only a few states. Ideally this election might mark the beginning of the end of “identity” as an important factor in our elections. We can only hope.

The Domain of Manners

With freedom comes responsibility, a responsibility that can only be met by the individual.

— Ronald Reagan

The Culture Wars have made it much more difficult for the Public to accurately understand almost any fast-breaking event. Ideology snakes itself into almost everything. Take the news coverage of Hurricane Helene. During the scenes of devastation, we heard one side blaming it all on climate change. On the other, we heard that FEMA would be compounding the tragedies through its emphasis on DEI (All the while, so many of us were focused on the lives lost and devastation, especially in western North Carolina. Very personally, the destruction of our beloved Biltmore Village hit us hard. The Boss and I were there just two weeks before Helene arrived.).

These ideological snakes are so intertwined that they have become a Gordian knot strangling our access to accurate information. I try to cut through this by getting information from many sides and then using each to filter the others, to get the nuggets of reality. In doing this, I’ve found some unusual sources, particularly on Substack. One of these is a neat little space called “Jotting in Purple” by Celia M Paddock.

One day last week, she reprised the text of an impromptu address given over 100 years ago to the Authors Club of London. It was given by Lord Moulton (UK) who was Minister of Munitions at the beginning of World War I. Called Law and Manners, its relevance to Present problems is startling (or at least to me – but maybe I’m easily startled!).

Lord Moulton’s focus is on people’s behavior. He divides what controls our behavior into three domains:

  • Positive Law – laws and regulations codified by government at some level;
  • Free Choice – uncontrolled except by our own self-interest;
  • Obedience to the Unenforceable – controlled by our duty to our community and our society.

The main thrust of his talk (from the 19-teens!) was that the domains of Positive Law and Free Choice were expanding to the detriment of that third domain, which he shorthanded as the Domain of Manners. A key phrase from his talk: the Public has “not yet learned that power [the ability to act] has its duties as well as its rights.”

For him, these were somewhat wry observations about his own time. For me, they were like looking at the picture on a jigsaw puzzle’s box. Suddenly a lot of pieces fell into place.

The Domain of Positive Law is definitely expanding. We have governments throughout the Western World imposing laws and regulations limiting what we can say and do. One of the first – and arguably one of the worst – of these laws was the Patriot Act. Passed in response to 9/11, it gave the federal government unprecedented power to listen in on our conversations. Perhaps the worst of these laws, though, are the numerous “Hate Crime” laws at the state and federal levels. They have tipped the scales of justice far to the side of the Prosecutors, with few checks to protect defendants’ rights.

While the Domain of Positive Law is expanding, so is the Domain of Free Choice, or at least it seems to be. To me, it’s more like the multi-culturism – “anything goes” – spawned in the 60s has become an Un-culture, one without fixed stars to help us navigate our lives. A culture has norms which act as those fixed stars. A culture sets expectations of behavior and responsibility. A culture helps us “find a reason to believe.” Thus, our current Un-culture with its kaleidoscopically changing “do’s and don’t’s” creates a sort of vacuum that Free Choice fills.

But in the Domain of Free Choice there is little Responsibility. We see this in many things. Take “my body, my choice” for example. Women took the power to make their reproductive decisions. Too many forgot that that also meant they took the responsibility for those decisions. And as Tim Carney has pointed out:

“Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception, the man can reason, why should I sacrifice myself to get married?”

The intellectual rot that’s set in at many of our colleges and universities provides another example. At one time, academic freedom meant that one could espouse any view as long as others in the community of scholars could do the same. Over time, that responsibility to protect others’ right to express themselves was lost. Just as Freedom without Responsibility descends into License, so too academic freedom without responsibility became licentious. We have the sad spectacle of climate scientists trying to silence those with contrary views. We have the sad spectacle of faculty and students in the so-called liberal arts preventing those with views contrary to theirs from even speaking. Even sadder is the spectacular anti-semitism of faculty and students.

Thus, Moulton’s Domain of Manners is actually the Domain of Responsibility. Its shrinking can drastically impact our communities. For a community’s success – whether civic or a community of scholars – ultimately depends on people who feel a responsibility to help make their community successful. They have an innate sense of duty that impels them to go beyond their personal interests for the greater good. Sadly, in too many communities, we’ve seen their number dwindling.

Oddly, I’m guardedly optimistic that the tide is starting to turn. Surely, the often-enforced isolation of the pandemic turned the attention of many inward and away from their communities. As memories of the pandemic are fading, many are rediscovering their own communities. We see so-called “classical schools” introducing a million students to those classics that were the basis for our own Culture of Responsibility. In the time of Hurricanes Helene and Milton we see so many working in their communities to clear the debris and restore normal living. So far to go, but small signs of hope.

Ecological vs engineering resilience

The goal of resilience is to thrive. – Jamais Cascio

Both Claire Rubin and James Brooke were kind enough to forward to me a short piece from The Conversation, by Prof A A Batabyal of RIT (nice that someone is looking out for me!). Although the short essay started by looking at “sustainability,” it was really focused on “resilience.” In particular, Batabyal contrasts “ecological” resilience against “engineering” resilience.

He uses a lake and a bridge as exemplars: the former for ecological resilience (as defined by Hollings) and the latter for engineering resilience (as defined by Pimm). The bridge has only one stable state; the lake has more than one stable states. As the Prof points out, Hollings’ definition boils down to how much stress an ecosystem can withstand before it restructures. Pimms’ definition of resilience relates to how fast a system can return to equilibrium.

The Prof then points out that most socioeconomic systems – such as communities – “exist” in multiple states. Thus, Hollings’ definition should be favored. I disagree, for several reasons.

First and foremost, Hollings’ definition and the panarchic framework it leads to is not very useful for a community trying to become more resilient. The definition requires us to observe a system under stress and then watch it change. The amount of stress needed to force the system to change is its “resilience.” If I’m a community professional, in essence this implies I have to let the community fail before I can gauge its resilience! Of course this is nonsense – but it does point to the difficulty of predicting a community’s resilience using this approach.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is knowing whether a community has restructured. Take New Orleans after Katrina as an example. There were several differences in the Before and After:

  • The city’s population dropped by a third.
  • Several new civic organizations were put in place.
  • There were measureable changes in the performance of important community systems (e.g., student performance improved).
  • Much of the sleaze in the French Quarter disappeared.

Did these indicate a change in structure?

Then there’s the “resilience-to” problem.In practical terms, we know that a community generally doesn’t have a single “resilience.” Rather a community’s resilience depends on

  • The stressor. A community may be able to deal with a great deal of economic stress, but fold like a house of cards in the face of a pandemic.
  • The speed of stress. A community may be able to adapt to a high level of stress spread over time but unable to tolerate the same stress experienced as a rapid shock.
  • The amount and type of damage, and the resources available for recovery.

Pimm’s concept of “engineering resilience” has the advantage of seeming more like what people think of as resilience. As the result of a Wild Thing – some sort of extreme event – a community loses capacity or functionality. Over time, the community recovers from the Wild Thing and regains its capacity. The time required to regain its functionality is the community’s resilience. Bruneau et al’s concept of resilience is very consistent with this idea.

From a community’s standpoint, community systems are either functional or failed – they either do or don’t meet the community’s demand for their function. After the damage wrought by a Wild Thing, the community at large doesn’t really care whether the health care system, or the system providing electricity are structured the same as before. They only care whether they can obtain the same (or better) health care as before the Wild Thing. They only care whether they can get light when they flip the switch, or air conditioning when it’s hot outside. Community professionals are most concerned with determining how soon after a Wild Thing the health care system is functional; how soon the lights can come back on after power is lost.

The stress testing approach* that Jennifer Adams and I have developed provides community professionals with a way to gauge this type of resilience. To summarize, community professionals postulate a particular Wild Thing – type, intensity, timing. This leads to a prediction of the damage the Wild Thing will cause. This in turn leads to a prediction of which community systems will fail. The resilience of each system is then determined by the use of dispatchable capital over time. The resilience of the community is inferred to be the resilience (time to recovery) of the last system to recover.

Community professionals and communities themselves want to know how resilient they will be to Wild Things before they occur. Simply put, Hollings’ approach to resilience may be useful in explaing what happened to a community as a result of a Wild Thing after the fact. It’s not very useful to community professionals trying to determine their community’s “recoverability” before a Wild Thing strikes. There is a certain inevitability to the “ecological” resilience approach when applied to communities. If sufficiently stressed, they will fail and restructure. When and how and to what is unanswered. Measuring the “engineering” resilience of communities using stress testing methodology gives community professionals answers they can work with, and is more intuitive. The approach can indicate paths to reduce damage and community system failures. It can also point to which additional resources could speed the community’s recovery from a Wild Thing. Ultimately, it can make recovery surer and more rapid – and communities more resilient.

_______________

* M. J. Plodinec, “Stress Testing of Community Resilience to Extreme Events,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 18(2), 151-176 (2021).

Five easy pieces

“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.” ~ William James

Purpose of a community

Quite simply, the purpose of a community is to provide its members with the quality of life they want. If what the community provides either drifts or jumps away from what they want, people leave. We’ve seen this response to “defunding the police” in too many of our great cities – LA, San Fran, Portland, New York…. This mismatch between what people want and what the community provides leads to hollowed out cities. Those who can (esp the middle class), leave. The community’s remnant is a powerful elite and a struggling underclass. Some expect unearned benefits. All are crushed by the taxes and fees and other dictates exacted and enacted by the elite.

Business of a community

Quite simply, the business of a community is to increase its “community capital” so that it can maintain, and perhaps improve, the quality of life it provides. When people leave, they take capital with them. If there is a net out-migration, the community has less capital to fulfill its purpose. As we’ve seen with the Rust Belt cities and others such as St. Louis, this becomes a vicious cycle: fewer resources leading to a poorer quality of life, incentivizing people to leave, reducing the resource base even further. Conversely, communities that are growing have more resources – and more discretionary resources – to fulfill their purpose. This can lead to a virtuous cycle. There’s nothing inherently evil in “the rich getting richer;” but those caught in the vicious cycle of a crumbling community may be easily persuaded that it is so.

Knowledge and community decision-making

In 2007, Sarewitz and Pielke wrote an interesting article on “reconciling the supply and demand for science” in policy-making. They focused on research to guide policy formulation. I’ve generalized their work to “knowledge-gathering” to support community decision-making. For example, this would apply to expert advice.

S and P start with an often-overlooked aspect of decision-making – the need to engage the decision-maker when gathering knowledge to inform decisions. The decision-maker has to identify both the drivers for making a decision and the information needed. This led me to a useful (at least to me) set of 3-D cartoons that sort of predict/explain what “works” in providing information for decisions:

• A decision-maker who can communicate information needed for decision.
• A decision-maker engaged with those gathering information.
• The information provided is both relevant and comprehensive, i.e., all of the information available that helps the decision-maker make a good decision.

Each of the planes (Engagement-Knowledge, Engagement-Relevance, Knowledge-Relevance) can throw additional light on what leads to U3 advice (useful, usable and used!). In the following, the blue lines point toward the quadrant most likely to lead to U3 advice.

Human action

For many years, I have looked at communities through the lens of systems. In this age of specialists and technocrats, I’ve found this a very useful way to begin to solve a community’s problems – not just those that are obvious, but those that cascade through the community. Systems thinking lends itself to ferreting out the linkages – the interdependencies and couplings – that are key to avoiding unintended consequences.

Occasionally this approach has been criticized as too mechanical, and that it ignores the “human in the loop.” Actually, human action is at the core of my thinking. I define my systems in terms of people, and a system’s processes in terms of the actions that the people who make up the system take. So, for me, the “transportation system” isn’t roads, bridges, airports and so on, but rather the people who ensure that people and goods can safely and expeditiously go where they are needed. The people in these systems have fixed (infrastructure) and dispatchable (e.g., skilled technicians, maintenance equipment) assets that they use to take action – to achieve the system’s purpose.

This approach provides the context within which human action takes place. Too often we look at results as simply manifestations of the skill (or lack of skill) of those who are taking action. That misses the point that the results are also conditioned by how the system is connected, or wired. Skilled people usually overcome bad wiring, but at the cost of efficiency. The efforts of the less skilled are likely to be negated by bad wiring. Context counts!

Systems thinking also forces me to focus on linchpins and their connections. These are members of one system who link their system to others. In particular, these linchpins are crucial to the success of efforts to transform a community. In fact, my experience indicates that a community cannot positively transform itself without a tight web of linchpins who can work together.

“Wilding” and communities

After almost every plague in history, there has been a period of “wilding” – during which many survivors threw caution to the winds (France after the Terror may be another kind of example.). In the 1920’s, after the Spanish flu pandemic too many people invested money they didn’t have. Inevitably, this led to an economic crash but with socio-political impacts as well.

During the recent pandemic, many local governments intensified the social damage (via lockdowns and fear-mongering) caused by the pandemic which has led to a more severe “wilding” than we saw in the 1920’s. The riots of 2020-21, the public excesses of the LBGTQIA+ … are manifestations of this “– survivors”wiling.” In the 1920’s, the inevitable crash was more economic (reflecting the major mode of “wilding”?). This time, I fear, the crash will be more socio-political, and probably violent. Communities need to prepare for a crash, whether it is the violence I fear or whatever their guts tell them it will be.

Communities’ responses will likely be hamstrung economically, but good leadership can overcome that. The question we must then ask is – have we elected effective leaders?

Is resilience an illusion?

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice. ~ Stephen Covey

Last month, Claire Rubin – knowing my obsession with great interest in all things Resilience – sent me a link to a blog by Professor David Alexander – Resilience is an Illusion. After reading it the first time, I promptly went on vacation for two weeks, still pondering Alexander’s provocative post.

Surprisingly, I agree with much of what Alexander wrote, while disagreeing with his conclusion (obviously!). His view of Resilience is that of Hollings – a sort of Nietzschean eternal recurrence. This was originally focused on ecological systems returning to a stable state after a disturbance. Alexander quite properly points out that Change has become inherent in our lives. Instabilities of many types abound, often coupling with strong underlying trends. He concludes that Resilience “can only be attained by constant adaptation, which is a case of pursuing an ever-receding goal.” Thus, for him, the illusory nature of Resilience. He closes by advocating that we focus instead on vulnerabilities – identifying and reducing them.

Personally, I’m really uncomfortable with the Hollings view of Resilience (and his and Lance Gunderson’s overlying Panarchy concept), especially when applied to communities. I have two fundamental problems with the concepts: time and agency.

Even if this eco-construct is completely accurate over the long-term (e.g., it has been applied to the Roman Empire’s rise and fall), it is descriptive rather than predictive. If I’m a community leader worried about my community’s future, it adds nothing to my understanding of what’s happening next week, next month, next year or even next decade.

Similarly, while the concept is useful in describing the evolution of ecological systems, it seems to assume that over the long-term communities are essentially passive. Awash in a sea of influences, a community thus resembles a ball in a multi-dimensional game of ping-pong, unable to dodge any of the paddles aimed at it.

This ecosystem conception of Resilience when applied to communities (or any type of human society) ignores the fact that they are made up of humans. As implied by the Covey quote above, we think, we dream, we aspire, we create. While we cannot completely control our Future, we can envision what we want it to be and steer our lives toward it.

To put this in terms of the Law of Community Momentum, this ecosystem concept changes the Law from “A community’s trajectory will not change unless some force changes its path” (i.e., trajectory is destiny only if you take no action) to “A community’s trajectory will not change.” Alexander ultimately seems to accept this while calling Resilience illusory.

In fact, I strongly agree with Alexander that community resilience requires – demands – that communities adapt to their changing contexts. Alexander seems to despair of their ability to do so. I don’t. I believe that if a community’s leadership can stare into the abyss of the present clear-eyed and without ideological blinders, they can find a path to a better future. And if they are committed to their communities, they will take it. We have examples of this – Charleston, SC, taking advantage of Hurricane Hugo’s havoc to build a stronger, more livable city. We have Pittsburgh and Charlotte – each reinventing and reinvigorating itself – in the face of crumbling economic foundations. In each of these, we have leaders who cared about their communities enough to step up and act. Each of these a case study for the reality of Resilience. Resilience illusory?  Absolutely not!

Triumph of the Trads

The vision recurs; the eastern sun has a second rise; history repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again.

— A N Mouravieff

In this series, I am presenting scenarios that represent possible Futures. Each Future is not intended to be an end state. Instead, each is a possible way station in our country’s evolution about a decade from now. My goal is not to write a history of each Future but rather to point to plausible paths that could lead us to that Future – looking for its “mystic rhymes” in our history. Unfortunately, politics will impinge on each scenario, but I will try to be as non-partisan as possible.

I call this first way station the “Triumph of the Trads,” signaling a resurgence of more traditional American values: family, community, civility and hope. The voice of “woke-ness” is muted, not silenced. As in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s there is dissent, but it is now more couched in aspirational terms, echoing Dr King: calling on our better angels to surpass what we have been, calling for evolution not revolution.

Oddly enough, this scenario starts with the election of Trump to the Presidency (His braggadocio and bluster are perhaps a better reflection of our current state than we’d like to admit.). His 2024 Presidential campaign captures an unparalleled number of minority and blue collar voters, overcoming Biden’s advantage among college-educated voters. Trump immediately begins a concerted effort to trim our bloated bureaucracies. He proceeds with his now-customary chaotic fits and starts, punctuated by the media’s predictions of dire consequences. But there is a definite shift toward a leaner, more competent, federal government.

In 2026, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence. Planning has gone on for over a decade for celebrations across the country. There is a veritable orgy of patriotic fervor, and a renewed dedication on the part of many to the principles enunciated so well in the Declaration of Independence. Although there are protests, the anniversary celebrations are wildly successful. This is in part due to a surge in religious feeling and churchgoer attendance. Overall, a feeling of something like hope starts to bloom across most of the country.

However, barely after the confetti has been swept up, ill health forces Trump to hand the reins to his Veep. His selection as Vice-President is very significant in this Future. Trump has chosen a younger person of color with an inspiring family story, emphasizing personal effort and grit. The now-President is almost an embodiment of the American Dream.

Seldom have the Man and the Moment been so well-met. The new President builds on the bursts of patriotism to begin to rebuild bipartisanship in Congress. Both parties follow his lead in consciously turning down the rhetorical heat. This stands him in good stead in his second term when he gets Congress to pass dramatic reforms to both Medicare and Social Security, assuring their solvency.

During his first term, non-college-educated workers regain the upward income trajectory they enjoyed prior to the pandemic. Inflation is tamed. His second election campaign signals the completion of the realignment of the political parties. The working class coalition that was so important in getting Democrats elected in the 20th Century is no longer a voting bloc the Dems can rely on. In fact, joining with small business owners, they tend to vote cultural issues rather their pocket books, reject “woke-ism,” and vote Republican especially in the 2028 and 2032 elections. The Democratic party is now led by Big Business (esp. Big Tech), academia, the cultural elites and those living in big cities (but whose populations continue to decrease).

The President also uses the Bully Pulpit as well as the Department of Education to advance policies aimed at encouraging diversity of viewpoints. The University of Chicago’s principles serve as the basis. Incidents of viewpoint discrimination are much less frequent, though there are pockets of resistance.

When the President leaves office on January 20, 2037, his successor rightly characterizes him as “everyone’s friend, but nobody’s fool.” Economically, the country is the strongest it’s been in the last quarter century. This is helped by demographics: as the Baby Boomers pass, less of our budget has to go toward their entitlements and pensions. In foreign affairs, the President has steered a careful course. His State Department has extended the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia. China has continued to claim Taiwan, but his Cabinet has greatly decreased the nation’s dependence on China for precious metals and electronics. The standoff in Ukraine has been resolved.

Perhaps his greatest legacy, however, is a turn toward civility in the country. He is not a very flamboyant person, but after the Sturm und Drang of Trump-Biden people find that they kind of like “boring.” The positive economy and the downturn in the volume of political rhetoric also have important implications for communities.

In this scenario, communities find what is probably their most positive Future. The financial stress due to pensions is largely relieved. The economic gains of their members translate into increased business activity and tax revenues. The trimmed federal government empowers them to do more for themselves. The rebirth of civility in civic affairs means that they can actually accomplish more – compromise is easier when everyone can get something they want. For many communities this leads to an enhanced “Culture of Accomplishment” – a confidence that the people living there can make good things happen. As a result, the quality of life in a majority of communities is improved, though some still stumble (There’s no cure for bad governance!).

In short, this scenario is actually the “High Resilience” scenario – more resilient families and individuals living in more resilient communities. In a sense, this is sort of an outlier – probably a low probability of occurrence from where we are now. Many things need to break right for it to happen. But that’s one of the benefits of working through scenarios – we can take conscious action to go after those we deem more positive, and try to mitigate the more negative.

In my next post, I’m going to interrupt this series to look at some interesting data relating to corruption. Following that, I’ll resume this series with “The Empire Strikes Back.”

The Coming Crisis

History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.

Attributed to Mark Twain

Eighty years ago, our nation’s armies and the world were being savaged by World War II’s dogs of war. Eighty years before that, the country was in the midst of our Civil War. Eighty years before that – almost exactly 240 years ago – the Treaty of Paris ending our Revolutionary War was signed. Do you see a disturbing pattern here?

Mark Twain’s “rhymes” are the patterns that prophets use to foretell the future. Over the last few months, John Mauldin has collated predictions based on historical patterns that indicate that the next ten years may well be more tumultuous than any of us have seen before in our lives. These come from three very different perspectives: one demographic, one geopolitical and the other historical. Independently, William White has observed that we are passing from an Age of Plenty to an Age of Scarcity. A crisis is coming, with potentially profound impacts on our communities. In this post, I’ll look at the patterns that point to crisis. In the next, I’ll offer two different possible futures that the coming crisis might lead to. I’ll also offer some thoughts on how the coming crisis might impact our communities.

Neil Howe focuses on generations and their characteristics. He sees a cycle of 80 years, roughly corresponding to the human life span. A generation of Nomads is followed by Heroes, then Artists and Prophets. Each generation is born during a 20-year period; each dominates affairs in their later middle age (40-60), and then begins yielding to the next generation. This change from one generation to the next is called a Turning.

Heroes must deal with the great crises of their times. They are the ones who fought and won our Nation’s independence from Great Britain. They are the ones who preserved the Union and ended slavery. They are the Greatest Generation who won World War II. Artists watched their Hero-parents struggle through crisis, but are powerless to act. As a result, they are risk-averse conformists. Their times tend to be relatively calm and crisis-free. Prophets reap the advantages – and the disadvantages – of never knowing a real crisis. They tend to be focused on cultural and moral issues (e.g., the ‘60s), and – most importantly – set the stage for the next crisis. They are followed by the Nomads, pragmatists who are suspicious of bureaucracies of any form. Because they have few connections and trust only themselves, crises brought on by the Prophets tend to fester when Nomads are in power. It is up to the next generation of Heroes to resolve them.

According to Howe, we are now in the Fourth Turning – Gen X (Nomads) giving way to the Millenials (Heroes). It started with the Great Recession, and should reach its culmination around 2030. Going back to the 15th century, Fourth Turnings have been times of crisis and upheaval. They were often violent, but more importantly, have each resulted in social upheaval. To quote Mauldin, “This major upheaval doesn’t have to include war, or at least the calamitous shooting wars of past cycles. Hopefully. But anyone who thinks the current cultural antagonisms, rabid partisanship, unrealistic expectations, geopolitical turmoil, and the staggering accumulation of debt will end with a whimper isn’t paying attention.”

George Friedman, one of the preeminent observers of the geopolitical scene, has observed an 80-year institutional cycle and a 50-year socioeconomic cycle in our nation’s history, starting in 1783. A crisis occurred at the peak of each cycle; for the first time, those peaks coincide. That implies the coming crisis will be both an institutional and a socio-economic one. Again, to quote Mauldin, “it seems likely we will face social crisis, economic breakdown, and structural political change—all at the same time.”

Friedman sees our increased longevity and reduced reproduction as fueling the crisis. We have an increasing number of elderly consumers, spending their own savings (and pensions – in some cases) as well as their Social Security benefits, and Medicare for health care. In principle, Social Security and Medicare are supported by taxes on workers, but fewer births means that the number of workers supporting each older American has almost halved – falling from 6 in 1980 to slightly more than 3 now. And the ratio is continuing to decrease – this is not sustainable!

Friedman points out that the last institutional crisis – dealing with the post-World War II world – was solved by transitioning to “government by experts.” In the post-war world, our experts were truly heroes. George Marshall shepherding Europe’s economic recovery. Lewis Strauss forming the “Atoms for Peace” program. Eisenhower championing the Interstate Highway System, and many others.

However, we currently are awash in “experts” seemingly more adept at bureaucratic gamesmanship than solving our problems. As I’ve previously noted, the economists at the Federal Reserve are largely responsible for the widening gulf between rich and poor. It is clear that the masking and lockdown “guidance” from the “experts” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was, at the least, misguided. And the remote learning foisted upon us by the “experts” in the educational establishment will continue to wreak havoc on the futures of our disadvantaged youth, perhaps for generations.

Peter Turchin is a Ph.D. zoologist, who founded the field of cliodynamics. He and his colleagues have focused on the study of state formation and collapse, compiling a database that spans virtually all of recorded history. Using mathematical models to test trends, he concluded that

“when a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars), a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.”

Turchin has noted that as societies age, they naturally evolve into a state of inequality. An elite forms, based on wealth and education, which directs the actions of the commoners. Turchin sees this as a power imbalance. Over time, the gap between the two widens leading to the commoners becoming what Turchin calls “immiserated,” no longer able to work to achieve the advantages of being in the elite. As an aside, before the pandemic, data indicated that social mobility – the rate of socio-economic “churn” – had significantly slowed, consistent with Turchin’s slowly building crisis. The decreasing life expectancy of lower middle class white men is also in line with Turchin’s view of immiseration.

According to Turchin, over time the elites over-produce – a group of educated potential elites, who are without power, and in danger of slipping into immiseration. It is at this point that the crisis arises as there is a competition between the elites and these counter-elites. As Turchin points out, the crisis often turns violent and rarely turns out well for the society as a whole.

One more negative pointer – William White sees the global economy moving from an Age of Plenty” to an “Age of Scarcity.” He believes that its systemic instability (high public and private debt, geopolitical turbulence, declining workforce worldwide, restricted energy supplies due to fears of climate change, …) are leading to political instability, that is being exacerbated by the distrust in established institutions.

To add my personal viewpoint, this omni-directional distrust seems to be the one “belief” that currently unites Americans of all political persuasions. A Turchin might point to the CDC’s botched handling of the pandemic. A Friedman might point to Biden’s timid attempts to prevent the Russo-Ukrainian War. A White might point to the Fed’s fiddling with the economy that has exacerbated the wealth gap between rich and poor. But universal distrust in our institutions has become the hallmark of our age.

None of us can predict how all of this will play out. we can only postulate a range of futures. It may be my own personal idealism, but I believe that our future path will depend on how we resolve this lack of trust in our institutions and ourselves. In the next post, I’ll spin out two scenarios of how these crises might be resolved, and their impacts on our communities.

Five Pillars of Community Resilience

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Noam Chomsky

The other week, Claire Rubin sent me a link to an article from Beaumont resilience training – Here’s How to Use Resilience to Move out of Your Comfort Zone. The author – Laura Ponting – focuses on the personal growth of the individual, but her “five pillars” seem to fit well with my own conception of community resilience as a springboard for growth – development or strengthening – of a community, i.e., for making a community more Future-fit.

I apologize to Ms Ponting – I’m reorganizing her order to suit my [sometimes – often?] warped logic. I’ve also taken some of her words out of context, to help make my points. I’m also couching this in terms of systems; after all, communities are first and foremost complex adaptive systems (CASs). I’ll also use the Seven Community Capitals as a way to clarify some of my points.

First Pillar: Purpose. Future-fitness – growing in strength and capability – requires not just action, but purposeful action. Action — to strengthen the individual or the community. Since a community is only successful if it provides the quality of life its members want, the purpose of becoming more resilient is to safeguard that quality of life, and to improve it if possible. This is often called a vision; the community’s conception of what that stronger community will be. The community as a whole has to buy into that vision, or else it is likely that it won’t be realized.

In particular, this requires cultural capital. A common language to describe and understand that future state. A common self-confidence that breeds optimism. As Chomsky implies, without that confidence and the optimism it engenders, the community won’t work together to achieve it.

Second Pillar: Self-awareness. “Know Thyself” is not just an inscription on a Greek temple; it is the zero-th step for any community plan. For the community as a system, self-awareness means knowing who its members are. It means knowing how they are connected – or not. It means knowing the “balances” in each of its capital accounts, and the constraints or limits on the use of each capital. Most importantly, it means that the community’s leaders know how to make decisions and take action (human and institutional capital).

Third Pillar: Mindfulness. “Mindfulness” for a community equates to situational awareness. Communities as systems are in dynamic environments, with trajectories conditioned by both internal and external forces. “Mindful” communities recognize not only where they’re headed, but the forces that are driving them. The fine people at ResOrgs in NZ consider situational awareness one of the four enablers of effective crisis strategic planning.

Situational awareness rests on the community’s social capital. It requires “ears to the ground” within the community to gauge the community’s mood and its ability to move. Situational awareness also requires linchpins keenly tuned in to sources of information outside the community. They can warn the community about new sources of stress and alert the community to unexpected opportunities.

Fourth Pillar: Self-care. As individuals, we know we have to take care of ourselves. We exercise (well, some of us do). We have physicals to tell us whether we’re overweight, have high blood pressure, are pre-diabetic or any of the other warning signs the doctor looks for. And if we’re wise, we take action to avoid further damage to our vitality.

The same holds true for our communities. We know that if we fail to maintain our homes or our physical and natural infrastructure, they may be damaged in a severe storm, or even collapse from neglect. But the same holds true for our “softer” infrastructures.
• our community’s culture that, at its best, brings us together and gives us the confidence to act;
• our community’s social networks that enable us to communicate with each other, and – in times of crisis – tell us where resources are needed;
• our community’s economy that provides us with the financial capital to take action.

And just as we as individuals have physicals to point out where action is indicated to strengthen us, so too should we in our communities be aware of those signs that point out that action is needed. More frequent maintenance of physical systems, rising crime, a fraying social fabric, or growing poverty each are indicative of the need for “self-care” for our communities.

Fifth Pillar: Positive relationships. Ms Ponting couches this in terms of finding people to support us, esp. as we strive to better ourselves. The same holds true – in spades – for communities. It is simply a reflection of the economy of scale. The more resources we can bring together, the more we can do. If we work smartly (after all, two heads are better than one) we can make our communities more functional and better places to live for all of us.

But there are also traps for the unwary in this. First, “working smartly.” If we let ideology overrule reality, in other words if we don’t couple Purpose and Mindfulness/Situational Awareness, then we may actually harm our community. The debacles that so many of our big cities have become – crime, filth in the streets, the ugliness of the hopeless homeless – are monuments to failed ideologies not rooted in reality.

The second trap seems to be endemic in our age of “engagement.” Even the best of ideas can die the death of a thousand cuts in a committee. When egos are engaged, everyone wants to see a little of themselves in what’s done. That leads to inefficiencies and sometimes even alters the idea so much that it no longer supports the Purpose.

A third trap is the difficulty in overcoming the distrust and mistrust that seems to be endemic in our not-so-civil civil life. It sometimes seems that no one has the authority to act but everyone has veto power over any action. Relationships ultimately are grounded in trust. In our age, however, Trust has become a rare commodity. Thus, building positive relationships particularly in our polarized polity is not for the faint of heart.

Five Pillars for strengthening us as individuals; Five Pillars to move our communities toward a better and more secure future. That should be our Purpose. Achieving the Purpose has to be grounded in self- and situational-awareness, so we can set a realistic path from today to that better tomorrow. As we advance upon that path we must maintain those strengths we rely on to move forward – self-care. And if we can find willing partners to support us, these positive relationships can help us to advance more rapidly.

Our 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. –

Declaration of Independence

This week the US celebrates its founding. The date chosen commemorates the signing of our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. This document is arguably the most important written in the English language in the last 250 years. Its ringing words sparked our own and the French revolutions. It voiced the aspirations of the voiceless around the world yearning for a better life.

And let there be no mistake – it is truly an aspirational document. It articulates a vision of what our nation should be. Our Founding Fathers were all too aware that government formed by Man cannot be perfect; our Constitution with its checks and balances is their attempt to protect our “inalienable rights.” I believe all of them recognized their society’s failings; Slavery – America’s original sin – chief among them. Three quarters of a million died as part of our national penance to expiate and exterminate this sin. The Declaration and the Constitution established an aspirational culture in our country that continues to be a magnet attracting those from other countries who want to have a piece of the American Dream.

However, we now live in a world in which many Americans are questioning those aspirations and would have us deem the American Dream a nightmare. Some want to subvert our aspirational culture and deny the importance of the rights so many have sought and so many have fought to ensure.

This battle of conflicting visions of our future is being fought at the national level, in our state capitals, and in our communities. It has profound implications for our resilience at each of these levels. And while Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Livingston and Sherman didn’t use that term, I think it’s important to examine the impact of the Declaration on our resilience.

First and foremost, the Declaration is about “Rights.” In our highly polarized politics at the national level, both sides claim to be for “Freedom,” although they seem to be worlds apart in what they think Freedom is. To me, our Bill of Rights – inspired by the Declaration – lays out an excellent definition of our Rights, especially in the First Amendment. We must be free to believe as we wish and to express those beliefs. We must be free to peaceably assemble. In the Constitution, these are couched in terms of prohibiting the federal government from denying these rights. But it is just as important that we recognize that no individual or group has the right to abridge those freedoms either. “Cancel culture” does not exist in a society that values freedom.

But – in more subtle ways – the Declaration also speaks to Freedom’s homely twin – Responsibility. In the Declaration, the Founding Fathers talk about the duty of the people to “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them” (to wax Shakespearean). The Declaration also states that the colonists have reached out to their fellow citizens in Great Britain, implying a responsibility of citizens to support each other.

This theme is also hidden in the famous phrase “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This was originally the more prosaic “Life, liberty and property” borrowed from John Locke. Jefferson changed this based on another of Locke’s essays in which the pursuit of happiness is seen as the antithesis of today’s “don’t think twice, it’s all right” culture. Rather, in Locke’s (and apparently Jefferson’s) view, the pursuit of happiness was not chasing whatever “feels good now,” but rather thinking in terms of what is best overall. In other words, seeking the timeless rather than the timely. In the Federalist papers, both Madison and Hamilton referred to this as social happiness.

Today, many question the Declaration and its worth. They assert that the Founding Fathers’ conceptions were necessarily corrupted by their owning of slaves. They assert that so much has happened – so much more has been learned since then that these simple principles should be effectively abandoned. But what they fail to realize is that the Declaration is indeed timeless; that the flawed men who wrote it were all too aware of their own flaws. Those who would modify the Rights the Declaration so powerfully asserts ignore the role that these words played in bringing an end to slavery. The role that they played in the French Revolution. The role they more recently played in the UN’s Charter. The role these words continue to play in drawing immigrants to America so that they can pursue their dreams, so that they can create and pursue their own happiness. Calvin Coolidge said it well:

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward … Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Only free men and women can take purposeful action to better themselves and their families, whether in adversity or in good times. Only free men and women can truly be resilient. Our Declaration is the fundamental statement of both the Rights and Responsibilities of that freedom. It is thus the basis – the foundation – of our resilience.

Bureaucracy and Community Resilience

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of vision.

Jim Collins

Bureaucracies are inherently anti-democratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

Alan Keyes

I’ve had way too much experience with bureaucracies in my almost fifty years working with the federal government.  In the next couple of blogs, I’ll be looking at bureaucracy through the lens of community resilience.

First, a word of disclaimer.  My view of bureaucracy is well summarized in some of Moore’s laws of bureaucracy:

  • Bureaucracies have no heart.
  • Bureaucracies are perverse.
  • Bureaucracies will thrash about, causing much cost, pain and destruction.

If I (and so many others) feel this way, why do we still have bureaucracies?  There are two reasons for this that more or less mirror the quotes above.

  1. Most importantly, bureaucracies exist to carry out routine functions efficiently and in a consistent manner – bureaucracies are the wheels that keep organizations (governments, businesses…) running more or less smoothly.  But this also implies a more fundamental role for bureaucracies.  Their rules, regulations, and procedures encapsulate the organization’s corporate memory of what works, at least within a bureaucracy’s domain.  However, the more rigid this procedural structure, the more resistant the bureaucracy is to change.
  2. Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating.  As formulated in Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:  In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.  In other words, in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Larger organizations – and communities – tend to be more bureaucratic because they tend to do more things on a routine basis. All too often, however, their bureaucracies are rigid and resistant to change. But resilience is all about managing and adapting to change.  Achieving resilience thus means tearing down the walls between balkanized bureaucracies that are busily making their silos into fortresses.  This leads to a paradox:  if a community is working to become more resilient, it will try to take action through its tried and proven bureaucratic channels, the ones least prone to change.  Further, since adapting to major disruptions (e.g., pandemics, recessions) generally does not neatly fit into a single bureaucracy’s purview, it forces bureaucracies to interact with one another in non-routine ways.  If the community’s bureaucracies are flexible, the community is likely to be more resilient; if not, any efforts to enhance the community’s resilience become much more difficult. 

Of course, these are general thoughts.  However, they lead to some specific things to consider in determining whether a community’s bureaucracies will help or hinder efforts to become more resilient.

  • History.  If a bureaucracy is a sort of corporate memory container, then look at the challenges the community, esp. the bureaucracy, has faced.  Were they varied?  Were some of them relatively recent?  Were they successfully met?  “No” answers may indicate that the bureaucracy is too rigid.
  • The age of the bureaucracy.  Just like people, a bureaucracy can get “hardening of the arteries” with age.  It can accrete documentation requirements, for example, that continue on long after the need for a document has disappeared.  In a crisis, these will sow frustration in both the public and the bureaucracy and slow down recovery.
  • Collaboration.  Has the bureaucracy worked with others outside their domain to solve crosscutting problems?  City governments such as San Diego and Baltimore that are managed in a fashion that forces bureaucracies to work together toward common crosscutting goals are likely to be more resilient than ones that are managed in a more stovepiped manner.
  • Leadership.  Is the leadership of the bureaucracy open to new ideas?  Does the leadership have experience working outside the bureaucracy?  Has any of the leadership come from outside the bureaucracy?  Again, “No” answers raise red flags.
  • Innovation.  Has the bureaucracy periodically changed how it does business?  Is continuous improvement a part of its culture?
  • Number.  More bureaucracies imply more organizations that must be aligned to actually make something happen.
  • Accountability. Do community leaders hold their bureaucrats accountable for how they have served the people?

Bureaucracy can be a boon or a bane to community resilience. It’s up to the community – through its leaders – to determine which it is to be.