If you’re trying to keep track of the money spent by our Federal Government for “stimulus”, you must know that it’s not easy. CNN has a guide that I’ve found handy that tells me the Government has committed to $1.9 Trillion (With a capital T) and the Federal Reserve about $6.4 Trillion. It adds up to about $75,000 for every family in the USofA, a number so large that it still defies description. I was wondering if somewhere in all that was, in fact, a bit for our families – or at least the kids who will have to pay for this.
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Systemic Connections: Conclusion
We live in a time that seems to rarely be bounded by what we know. All around us are what appears to be an unlimited number of new scientific facts and imaginative ideas. Yet with all of the great products of our minds, we live in uncertain times. Great theories about economic systems have collapsed in disaster. Terrific advances in medicine are not available to everyone because we can’t figure out how to pay for them. Our political system lurches from one gridlocked intersection to another like a New York cabbie punching the accelerator and the brakes in rapid succession.
For all the smarts we have, our world doesn’t look all that smart.
Systemic Connections: Politics
Governments of various kinds and levels are the way people organize and define themselves, and their operating systems are politics. Connections have always been at the heart of politics for obvious reasons. In our modern democracies, journalists have tried valiantly to define elections based on issues and ideas, but it never works – the connections of politics are tribal and personal. People rarely change their affiliations because they’d lose the connections that define them in part, too. Issues come and go, but connections remain. That doesn’t mean that connections in politics never change, but change stalls until the tribes and their purported issues lose all connection with relevance.
Such a time might be now.
Systemic Connections: Economy
The art and skill needed to put knowledge to practical use is more than just what technology is really about – it’s generally seen an increasing share of our economy. The term “Knowledge Economy” comes from Peter Drucker in his 1966 book, “The Age of Discontinuity”. It includes this:
“In a knowledge economy where skill is based on knowledge, and where technology and economy are likely to change fast . . . the only meaningful job security is the capacity to learn fast.”
True enough, since a lot of knowledge applied as an art went to revolutionizing economics itself since that time. But as many of us have learned, the ability to think fast means nothing without the right connections.
Systemic Connections: Technology
Science and technology are two things that are often confused. This comes naturally because advancement in knowledge seems to lead directly to advances in the way we live and the stuff we have in our lives. New things require new origins, or so it seems. There is no difference biologically between us and the people who first cultivated crops and built cities which relied on their bounty 10,000 years ago, since there hasn’t been enough time for us to evolve – what separates us is nothing more than everything that has been written down or crafted since. As powerful as this idea is, it ignores the realities of invention.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 