We must adapt to succeed, and president isn’t helping
Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote a famous memoir, “Present at the Creation,” about the birth of the post-World War II order — an order whose institutions produced six decades of security and growth for a lot of people. We’re now at a similar moment of rapid change — abroad and at home. Many institutions have to be rethought. But any book about Washington today would have to be called “Absent at the Creation.”
Surely one of the most cynical, reckless acts of governing in my lifetime has been President Donald Trump and the GOP’s attempt to ram through a transformation of America’s health care system — without holding hearings with experts, conducting a cost-benefit analysis or preparing the public — all to erase Barack Obama’s legacy to satisfy a few billionaire ideologue donors and a “base” so drunk on Fox News that its members don’t understand they’ll be the ones most hurt by it all.
Democrats aren’t exactly a fire hose of fresh ideas, but they do respect science and have a sense of responsibility to not play around with big systems without an ounce of study. Not so Trump. He scrapped the Paris climate treaty without consulting one climate scientist.
That failure is particularly relevant because we’re going through three climate changes at once:
We’re going through a change in the actual climate — disruptive, destructive weather events are on the rise.
We’re going through a change in the “climate” of globalization — going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one. In this interdependent world, connectivity leads to prosperity and isolation leads to poverty. We got rich by being “America Connected” not “America First.”
Finally, we’re going through a change in the “climate” of technology and work. This is changing every job and industry.
What do you need when the climate changes? Adaptation at the individual, community and national levels.
At the individual level, the single most important adaptation is to become a lifelong learner, so you can constantly add value beyond what machines and algorithms can do.
At the community level, the U.S. communities that are thriving are the ones building what I call complex adaptive coalitions. These comprise local businesses that get deeply involved in shaping the skills being taught in the schools and community colleges, buttressed by civic and philanthropic groups. Then local government catalyzes these coalitions and hires recruiters to find investors for their local communal assets.
These strategies dictate the national programs you want: health care that is portable so people can easily move from job to job; as much free or tax-deductible education as possible; reducing taxes on corporations and labor to stimulate job creation and relying instead on a carbon tax that raises revenues and mitigates costly climate change; and immigration and trade policies that are as open as possible, because in an age of acceleration the most open country will get the change signals first and attract the most high-IQ risk-takers.
This is a uniquely bad time for us to have a racebaiting, science-denying divider in chief. He is impossible to ignore, and yet reacting to his antics only makes us stupid — only makes our society less focused on the adaptation challenges at hand.