The Future

I just finished reading The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change by Al Gore. I think everyone should read this book¹. It reminds me of when I first read The World is Flat² and, while I don't think it will have the popularity or impact that Friedman's book did, I think it should.

As you might expect, the book covers six major areas of change and there's no way a blog post can do it justice (which is why you should read it). Let me preface this by acknowledging that I do not claim to have any great understanding of economics³, so this is very much just a lay-person's perspective on this, but there were two issues he talked about that have been troubling me for a while (in addition to climate change), and I wanted to think out loud a bit about them here.

The idea of creative destruction, while initially a criticism of capitalism, has in recent years been looked on more favorably as a way to move forward, getting rid of older, obsolete industries, products or practices and replacing them with newer, more successful ones. Ever since the Luddites (and perhaps before), some folks have complained about new technological innovations replacing workers, and others have argued that overall it's a good thing and frees up workers to take on more interesting, meaningful and productive jobs. Certainly Friedman's work and Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, to name just two of many popular works, have touched on that second interpretation, and I've generally felt the same way (let automation take care of the grunt work and free us up to do more interesting, creative things).

But lately I've been wondering about that premise. It seems to me, and Gore talks about this in his book, that in some ways we are running out jobs. Given the increasing ability of various technologies to automate processes, including many we didn't think were possible to automate, and the ability of software and the Internet to remove the need for many intermediaries, where exactly are the new jobs going to come from to replace the ones that have been eliminated? What are people going to do (in terms of employment and earning a living)?

And this leads to the second thing I've been wondering about, and that Gore also talks about in his book: the idea of a growth economy. (Again, repeating the disclaimer about my lack of economic knowledge.) Partially because of my lack of knowledge, but also based in general on what I have been reading, I've wondered more and more if our notions of the economy are really just one big Ponzi scheme. As long as their are new people on the planet, and untapped markets, we can grow and prosper: the pie gets bigger. But what if we can't; and what if it doesn't?

Everything I read about recovering from The Great Recession talks about the need for growth. Every politician and economist - of just about every political persuasion - talks about growth as the holy grail, and cheers any signs of renewed growth and despairs when that growth is too small. But what if "growth" - at least as we've always defined it in economic terms - isn't sustainable? What if the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly The Great Moderation, were simply an anomaly⁴?

Is there a path forward for a sustainable economy and society that involves little or no growth? Again, I'm not knowledgeable enough about economics to speak to this, but that's certainly not a theory I've ever been introduced to, yet it seems to be a theory - and a practice - that we perhaps need. And, to tie this at least nominally back to education, if (and that's a big if) this has any merit, how should we be preparing our students for a future that isn't based on the classical economic definition of growth?

Update 7-23-13: See this video on how the Tesla is made as an example of the progress automation has made. Again, I think this is a good thing, but I'm just not sure how it works in terms of traditional employment economics.

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¹ I know some folks reading this blog may be tempted to not read it simply because of the politics of the author. I think that would be a mistake.

² I know it's currently fashionable to make fun of anything Thomas Friedman says, but I still think The World is Flat was more right than wrong, and it certainly brought many issues to the forefront of the public's consciousness in a way that no one else had.

³ Feel free to tutor me on economics (nicely) in the comments. But as far as I can tell, professional economists really don't have any idea of how economics works either. How else can you have what appears to be very intelligent, thoughtful folks argue for the exact opposite policies, or people so badly miss economic predictions?

⁴ I can't do this justice, but lots of reasons that might be so, including: the unique position of the U.S. coming out of WWII, technological and social innovation in the U.S. and the world as a whole, healthcare and quality of life issues, population, productivity, and market growth, etc.

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: This new economy tilts toward publicness.

Again from Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts, a quote I'd like my future principal to ponder (p. 137):

"Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive," says entrepreneur Sam Lessin. "Now the opposite is true: You have to pay a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy." You pay for privacy in the effort and hassle it takes to manage privacy settings. You also pay in the opportunity lost if you choose not to be public and social. On the other side of the ledger, you can be rewarded - with attention, influence, information, deals - if you reveal yourself. This new economy tilts toward publicness. (Emphasis mine.)

What opportunities might schools (students, teachers, administrators, communities) be losing by choosing not to be public and social? How are our fears possibly getting in the way of preparing our students to be successful in an "economy [that] tilts toward publicness?" As my future principal, how are you going to help our staff - and our students - understand the new privacy and the new publicness?

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: Isolation Costs Too Much

I'm currently reading Jeff Jarvis's book Public Parts. I'm not that far into it, so I don't know yet if I'd recommend my future principal read the book, but this quote from p. 45 is one that I'd like that person to ponder:

"Businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products." Now "they are changing into networks of business units whose assets are called relationships and capabilities." Turning that perspective into an investment strategy, I'd bet money on start-ups that put relationships at their center so they can disrupt old, closed industries (later we'll look at what social car companies and airlines look like; imagine, too, the social store, restaurant and school). I'd buy the stocks of companies that know me well and play well with others. I'd short the companies that build walls around themselves. In a linked world and a relationship economy, isolation costs too much. (emphasis mine)

I'd like my future principal to ponder, and lead the staff in discussion around, the idea that an isolated school, a non-social school, a "closed" school that isn't actively reaching out to others and building those relationships (including letting students build those relationships as an integral part of their learning), is a school that is ripe for disruption. I think they should also lead a discussion about how well such a school would be preparing their students to live, learn and work in a networked world.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: What To Tell Your Twelve-Year-Old

(This is part two in a possible series. See this post for an explanation of the future principal part of the title of this post.)

I found these two recent articles from the Economic Revolution column in The Denver Post pretty interesting. They're written by Dave Maney who, in his own words, attempts to "connect the dots to our economic future." This sums up the thrust of the two articles:

The prescription for the last few generations has been: Work hard in school, get into a good college, pick a career field with lots of demand, and success will follow. I'm pretty sure that's what my parents told me, and it served me well. But I'm afraid it's largely misguided advice now.

While I don't believe that education is solely about preparing you for future employment, I do believe that's part of our mission. I also believe that many of the current batch of reforms are being made in the name of economic success and competitiveness, yet they seem to fly in the face of what I see happening. (Which, of course, is probably why these two articles caught my eye, since I agree with much of what he says. It's always dangerous to read too much into something that confirms your own bias, but here goes.)

I particularly like how he attempts to state his "ten big ideas," but then also tries to frame them in terms of how he would begin a conversation with a twelve-year-old. For example, one of his points is:

In this tumultuous time, I wouldn't trust anyone's traditional prescriptions for success. (Nor mine for that matter.) It's incumbent on everyone to think for themselves, to observe, to interpret, to plan and to course-correct.

 And he frames it for a twelve-year-old as

Starting point for your 12-year-old: "School's important, but being able to think for yourself is more important. We should talk about how people learn to do that."

Perhaps these articles could be part of the basis for a good discussion led by our new principal about our current assumptions about what our students are going to need to be successful in the workforce. As a bonus article, we could add in The Career Of The Future Doesn't Include A 20-Year Plan. It's More Like Four:

The particulars of Hasler's young career can appear exotic and, yes, flighty. But his essential experience--tacking swiftly from job to job and field to field, learning new skills all the while--resembles the pattern that increasingly defines our careers. According to recent statistics, the median number of years a U.S. worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.4, down sharply since the 1970s. This decline in average job tenure is bigger than any economic cycle, bigger than any particular industry, bigger than differences in education levels, and bigger than differences in gender. (Since women are more likely to interrupt their careers for child rearing and caregiving, their average time in a job is even shorter than a man's.)

Hmm, reminds me a bit of this.

The Great Reset: A Crisis (in K-12 Education) is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Richard Florida has an interesting article in the March issue of the Atlantic titled “How the Crash Will Reshape America." He talks about how big, international economic crises typically usher in a new economic paradigm, and then speculates on what this economic crises may foretell:

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

. . . the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs.

I would argue that “our [schools are] in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation,” shifting away from a model that values standardization and conformity toward one that values creativity and differentiation. I would also suggest that “velocity of ideas” and “density of talented and creative people” is what we would ideally hope for in our schools, but I wonder if our schools – as currently structured – allow those talented and creative people to flourish and explore those ideas.

This interview accompanied the article and is what spurred this post. He reiterates his “the world is not flat, it’s spiky” argument, and argues for great urban centers of creativity and economic activity.

But as you mentioned, we have this kind of mythology going around that somehow the rise of new technologies—communication and transport technologies, which shrink the world—will spread out our geography. We always have this kind of romantic notion that technology will free us from the dirty, the pathological, the slum-ridden, the unhealthful city, and that the world will spread itself out.

. . .There are two tendencies in the world economy. There is a great tendency for low-cost, fairly standardized stuff to spread itself out, and that’s where people say, “Oh my God, the world is flat.” But there’s also this counter-tendency for things to concentrate—to take advantage of these forces of agglomeration and human capital. So what I tried to argue is that that second tendency is very important. And now we have all sorts of World Bank reports talking about how productivity and performance are so much higher in urban areas, even in the emerging economies.

What I tried to do in this piece is say, “I don’t think this great crisis—or great ‘reset,’ as I like to call it—will change this trend. In fact, my hunch is that, coming out of this crisis, our geography will end up more concentrated than it was before.”

While I think he perhaps underestimates the power of technology to allow that "agglomeration" and to bring together "human capital" in geographically dispersed locations, his argument for bringing together people in dynamic environments focused on creativity and innovation makes a lot of sense to me (whether they are geographically concentrated or technologically connected). How many of us would describe our school as dynamic environments focused on creativity and innovation?

And then he says:

Well, I am worried, and I think many people are worried, that we would waste public investment on bailing out the industries of the past—on things like automotive bailouts, which promise to simply prop up and breathe life back into industries that certainly show their share of problems in international competition. And that’s why I like to think of this as a “great reset” rather than a crisis. What economic crises do is reset the conditions for technological innovation and consumption and demand.

But rethinking infrastructure changes the institutional rules of the game and the way people and industries organize themselves geographically. What that does is create new patterns of living, new patterns of working, new patterns of consumption, and new demand.

. . . So it’s important to spend money on the right kinds of projects and the right kinds of infrastructure.

. . . If we take as a first principle that we really have to invest in the creativity of each and every individual—and give people the right to express their creative talents in ways that they find interesting and relevant—then I think we will end up with a better future than we otherwise would have had.

The phrase “great reset” really resonated with me, not only in the economic way he was using it but also in terms of K-12 education. He quotes Stanford economist Paul Romer, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” and I think that applies directly to the current situation in K-12 education. The current economic crisis only amplifies and exacerbates the current crisis we are experiencing in our schools, and if we continue to “waste public investment on bailing out [schools] of the past,” then we will indeed be wasting this crisis.

Instead, we should be taking this opportunity to “reset” our schools, to “create new patterns of” teaching and learning and “spend our money on the right kind of projects and the rights kinds of infrastructure.” We need to “take as a first principle that we really have to invest in the creativity of each and every [teacher and student] – and give [teachers and students] the right to express their creative talents in ways that they find interesting and relevant.”

From the original article:

The United States, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises in the past. On the contrary, it has used them, time and again, to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new. Throughout U.S. history, adaptability has been perhaps the best and most quintessential of American attributes . . . At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience. Can we do it again?

At times of crisis, the eventual “winners” that emerge are those that are bold and seize the crisis to move forward, taking advantage of the altered landscape to achieve their mission in creative, innovative and powerful ways. Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m seeing very little evidence of bold thinking. So, in this time of multiple crises, I would challenge my school district, and all K-12 schools, to not waste this crisis but, instead, reinvent themselves and look forward, not back. If we do, then, like Richard Florida, “I think we will end up with a better future than we otherwise would have had.”