Sometimes I wonder if I time-traveled back two decades if I could explain how we got to today's world to my high school self or anyone around then. Would anyone believe the US had been at war for twenty years or that a cameo real estate guy from Home Alone became president? In many ways day to day life - the cars, the built environment - hasn't really changed, but so much of the news is psychodrama.
Today I generally bet on things getting weirder.
What does the future hold? Today while scrolling the interwebs I stumbled on this wonderful Internal Tech Emails gem with some insights that resonated. Mark Zuckerberg had a number of conversations with board members and his executive team on:
...what we expect the world to look like in 2030 so we can plan and position our future work accordingly. One theme we've discussed is that many important institutions in our society (eg education, healthcare, housing, efforts to combat climate change) are still run primarily by boomers in ways that transfer a lot of value from younger generations to boomers themselves. Our macro prediction for the next decade is that we expect this dynamic to shift very rapidly as more millennials + gen Zers can now vote and as the boomer generation starts to shrink. By the end of this decade, we expect more of these institutions to be run by and for the benefit of millennials and younger generations.
During my first job job out of college, I wrote a blog post for the then number one California politics outlet, a wonderful niche publication run by two retired journo's called Calbuzz on similar themes regarding the broken social contract. (See here for some reflections on that era.) Below are some contemporaneous blog excerpts from young patwater, then an analyst at the nation's leading public finance consulting firm, dreaming of better days for CA in between grinding out excel models:
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, a leading consultancy, average total debt in ten developed nations rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008.
When I get to work, I sit in on a call to hear what some of our Managing Directors think about Greece and the implications of a Euro contagion for America’s municipal bond market. When I get off, the TV in the hotel weight room has CNN blaring about S&P’s decision to downgrade US debt because of “political brinksmanship.” Over dinner, green tea and pesto gnocchi, I mull what endemic unemployment (close to 20% for us under 25s) will mean for my generation.
Mounting debt, grinding gridlock and lost opportunity? Sounds all too familiar. From Washington to Athens, what we’re seeing might best be called the Californication of the Western world -- a growing sense that tomorrow will be worse than today.
Growing up I was told that if you work hard, if you do the right things, you'll have a good life. It’s a story many of us were told as children, a story intimately connected to America's dream of a better life on these shores. This story acquired a special resonance in California, as tales of gold paved streams, incredible IPOs for Silicon Valley startups, and Hollywood images of a sunsoaked paradise have circled the globe. Yet today that dream of boundless opportunity is more myth than reality.
Perhaps most frustrating, the underlying operating mechanisms have been clearly broken in California during this time. A host of good government efforts have aimed to "fix" California, with some marginal improvements, but largely the underlying operating system has stayed the same.
Considering that our state has over 7000 local jurisdictions, ranging from Alpine County with under 500 people to the enormous Los Angeles County of over 13 million and spawning irrigation districts, cemetery districts, mosquito abatement districts and everything in between, how are we supposed to govern California as a coherent whole?
This “adhocracy” (to use the PPIC’s apt phrase) cuts to the core of the problems plaguing Western governments from California to Spain to Greece to the United States. The modern nation-state with its top-down logic of bureaucratic control is finding itself increasingly out of place in an iPhone world that places a premium on spontaneous interaction and peer to peer networks.
Today urgency has definitely increased. It's high time to prioritize the new over the old, to accept that the old industrial model for government is breaking and it's time to pioneer the new.
