Date registered: December 9, 2010
Dec
20
The framework for the federal government’s role as a positive force for society has three components. First, government must function in ways that are inherently helpful to maintaining stability in society. Second, it must take on the task of monitoring society’s health as a distinct function. Third, it must intervene in society to help correct… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Understanding the future will require accepting new paradigms of behavior, and predictions of where those paradigms will take us. To mediate successfully among progress and threats to progress, while preserving free and full individual expression, we must manage the internal challenges of keeping a free society functional. The old paradigm is unlocking Nature’s secrets: the… Continue reading »
Dec
20
There are a number of reasons to expect, intuitively and setting aside for the moment considerations that are more strictly academic, that cooperative models of human behavior are now likely to play a more dominant role in human evolution than in the past. The necessity of more intensive management as densities increase. Ten people in… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Addressing fundamental challenges in the application of cooperative models Lack of experience. One has only to observe, directly as a participant or indirectly, the machinations of a typical American homeowner’s association to see that inexperience in working with communal goals is endemic. At the national level, Americans have not designed our own country’s experiments in… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Corporations do it, cities and even some states do it, so why shouldn’t governments at the national level generate a strategic vision and plan? The advantages of doing so are obvious. With a real plan, government can more readily coordinate legislation and programs. It can strategically target investment in infrastructure to enhance competitive advantages, productivity,… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Governments are not good at problem-solving. Governments are primarily focused on “duties” associated with internal program administration. In this role governments are at best able to “manage” problems that are already known. Strategic orientation of any kind is a limited commodity in government organizations, especially strategies focused on anticipating, identifying or addressing emerging problems and… Continue reading »
Dec
20
To restore confidence to a system spiraling downward as we have recently witnessed, action must occur outside the system as it is presently configured. FDR’s New Deal, whether or not it was a “good” thing for the country in the long run, did at least coincide with economic recovery. Now, with the economy stressed by… Continue reading »
Dec
17
Consumer confidence, meaning here its formal measure through a systematic survey process conducted by The Conference Board, is a well-established indicator of current economic health and the prospects for future economic growth in at least the near-term future. At the root of assumptions about the usefulness of such measures is the notion that people’s economic… Continue reading »
Dec
17
When similar values, goals, interpretations of reality and the like are widely shared within a group, decision-making is relatively simple. Societies are however becoming increasingly polarized, both across nations and within them, due primarily to the speed of change in economies and other social influences – even in relatively mundane matters such as fashion, for… Continue reading »
Dec
17
At the risk of over-generalizing, societies are simply not good at long-range social/economic planning. Since this issue, and the topic of long-range planning in general, is seldom discussed in any type of public forum, we are mostly stuck with surmising what the problem is all about. There are problems of people engaged in the present… Continue reading »