I ran across this and found the conjecture to be of interest to me and
possible others.
The Challenge of Our Disruptive Era
It is arguably the largest economic transformation in recorded
history. Can our politics adapt?
Photo: David Gothard
By
Ben Sasse
April 21, 2017 2:54 p.m. ET
309 COMMENTS
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenge-of-our-disruptive-era-1492800857?mod=e2two#livefyre-toggle-SB11260320451415474002504583092762514384822>
I am a historian, and that usually means I’m a killjoy. When people say
we’re at a unique moment in history, the historian’s job is to put
things in perspective by pointing out that there is more continuity than
discontinuity, that we are not special, that we think our moment is
unique because we are narcissists and we’re at this moment. But what we
are going through now—the past 20 or 30 years, and the next 20 or 30
years—really is historically unique. It is arguably the largest economic
disruption in recorded human history. And our politics are not yet up to
the challenge.
There have been four kinds of economies: hunter-gatherers, agriculture
(settled agrarian farmers in their villages), industry (mass
urbanization and immigration), and whatever we’re entering now.
Sometimes we call it the information-technology economy, the knowledge
economy, the service economy, the digital economy. Sociologists call it
the “postindustrial” economy, which is another way of saying “we don’t
have anything to call it.”
What it really means is that jobs are no longer permanent. It used to be
that you did whatever your parents and grandparents had done.
Hunter-gatherers and farmers never even thought about it. There was no
such thing as job choice, only becoming 7 and 10 and 12 years old and
taking on more responsibilities to earn your keep.
Industrialization brought a massive disruption. At the end of the Civil
War, 86% of Americans still worked on the farm. By the end of World War
II, 80 years later, 60% of Americans lived in cities. One of the most
disruptive times in American history was the Progressive Era. And what
was Progressivism? Not much more than the response of trying to remake
society in an era of mass immigration, industrialization and rising
cities. But it turned out not to be as disruptive as people feared,
because once you got to the city, you got a new job, which you’d
probably have until death or retirement. And the social capital that
used to be in the village tended to be replicated in urban ethnic
neighborhoods.
What’s happening now is wholly different. The rise of suburbia and
exurbia, and the hollowing out of mediating institutions, is an echo of
the changing nature of work. In the 1970s, it was common for a primary
breadwinner to spend his career at one company, but now workers switch
jobs and industries at a more rapid pace. We are entering an era in
which we’re going to have to create a society of lifelong learners.
We’re going to have to create a culture in which people in their 40s and
50s, who see their industry disintermediated and their jobs evaporate,
get retrained and have the will and the chutzpah and the tools and the
social network to get another job. Right now that doesn’t happen enough.
Think about qualitative survey data—polls that ask, “What are the top
three or four things you’re worried about?” Ten years ago, nowhere on
the top 10 of that list was anything about prescription drugs. Today
opioids are a major concern. People are scared about drug abuse in
largely middle-aged populations. That’s a symptom of the economic
disruption.
I don’t mean to be exceedingly pessimistic. There are plenty of
wonderful opportunities for American families and innovators in this new
economy. For one thing, there are fewer middlemen complicating
transactions instead of adding value. So we’re going to get a lot more
visibility and transparency into product offerings, and consumers are
going to get higher-quality and lower-cost stuff.
In other industries, we don’t know how to price for things that turn out
to matter quite a lot. Think of the news media. We are going from a
world in which we had too much central control by a few large
organizations, to one in which everybody, everywhere can deluge us with
information. What is likely to happen next is not a lot more
higher-quality journalism. We’re going to have higher-volume journalism,
and some of it will be good. A free, thriving, and independent press is
critical to self-government, so this is a big challenge.
But people are also able to silo themselves into an echo chamber, where
they hear only things that they already agree with. More conspiracy
theories come to flower than ever before. You can see it on our college
campuses, where students don’t want to encounter any new idea without a
trigger warning. If you’re never going to encounter ideas that you
didn’t already know and affirm, I don’t know why your parents are paying
tuition, because education is all about wrestling with new ideas.
The political result is not just polarization, which is a big problem,
but political disengagement. If you think that the biggest problem in
America is the other political party and that your party has all the
answers, if only you could vanquish the other team from the field, I’ve
got a lot of people I’d like to introduce you to—because Washington
doesn’t have very good answers right now.
With the magnitude of the challenges we face in this moment of
disruption, it isn’t the case that one side is right and the other side
is standing in the way, or that one side is enlightened and the other
side is retrograde. It’s that we don’t have any of the right policy
conversations. Most of the really big challenges of this moment are not
easily reducible to core Republican or Democratic platform positions.
For one thing, we don’t have a national-security strategy for the age of
cyberwarfare and jihad. Since the 1640s and the Treaty of Westphalia,
we’ve had a view of geopolitics and national security that is about
state actors. There are lots of state-actor problems out there,
including Russia and China. But of the 200 or so countries in the world,
only about two-thirds really control all their territory.
The rest are more like Afghanistan, Syria or Libya. There may be some
entity that has more power than anyone else—think of the Taliban on the
eve of 9/11. But we weren’t attacked by the Taliban; we were attacked by
al Qaeda, which exploited the vacuums of ungoverned spaces in the
territorial borders of Afghanistan. A lot of the dangers and the threats
we face are from jihadi-motivated people who are going to
self-radicalize in place and create their own terror networks.
We also lack seriousness about tackling the entitlement crisis. The
Republican Party appears almost as indifferent as the Democrats to
telling the truth about entitlements. People talk about the national
debt, which is approaching $20 trillion. But that’s just the total of
intergovernmental transfers and publicly held bond debt. The number that
matters is the unfunded obligations of the U.S. government, including
future Social Security and Medicare payments. It’s more like $65
trillion to $75 trillion.
And what about the policy implications of the economic disruption? The
cultural, societal, familial and social-network responses to a world of
lifelong learning and job disruption are far more important. But there
are many potential policy responses in education and job retraining. Are
/any /of these conversations on our national agenda right now?
What will the American idea look like when we get to this new, disrupted
world of the digital economy? What will entrepreneurship look like? What
will cultural pluralism and a robust defense of the First Amendment look
like? What will it mean to be able to say that the meaning of America is
still centered in institutions that look like the Rotary Club—where
people actually live, where they know and love their neighbors, and
where they actually want to do good, not just wear tribal labels about
some distant fight in Washington that isn’t anywhere near up to the task
of the moment we face?
That’s the challenge before us, and here’s the good news: Throughout our
history Americans have been optimists, ready to seize the day. Let’s get
to work.
/Mr. Sasse, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Nebraska. This is
adapted form a speech he delivered to Colorado’s Steamboat Institute./
Appeared in the Apr. 22, 2017, print editio