The Fall and Decline of Government in the United States

The United States is in the grip of a political drama the likes of which no one has yet seen before.

Imagine a group taking a family hostage and demanding that their relatives give up the hard won property, money and basic rights they had worked so hard for so as to get that hostage back.  The reason for the hostage taking in the first place are spurious, but so enshrined in the belief system of the hostage takers as to beyond reason, especially reason based on evidence. If they called themselves the Taliban and declared their mission a jihad, the full resources of the United States would be deployed against them.

In this case, they are called the Republican Party, their hostage is the American people, their belief system is a jihad on the idea that the State should enable equity and reduce poverty and their jihad is based upon poor evidence, a paucity of ideas and very shallow thinking. In fact, they have had no new ideas since their previous Jihad leader, Newt Gingrich, advances exactly the same thinking in 1996.

What it looks like is this: the GOP believe that deficits and debt are intrinsically bad, no matter that the deficit is falling in the US and that some level of US debt is inevitable, given the nature of its economy. They blame social security, Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare for the deficit and debt and point to fiscal forecasts of impending doom as costs of these services rise as a result of the retiring baby boomers. Their solution is to make massive cuts in these essential services (essential to enable social mobility, economic stability and growth) and to cut taxes on the rich and corporations. They still believe in trickle down economics, despite countless demonstrations of its lack of efficacy. They still believe in austerity, despite growing evidence that this leads to economic decline, widespread unemployment (especially amongst the young) and to growing social inequity.

The GOP is staggered by President Obama’s refusal to negotiate while the government is shutdown and while an established tradition of the US congress (automatic renewal of the debt ceiling) is broken and bipartisan politics appears “dead” as a Dodo. But he is following the standard policy of dealing with terrorists and Jihadists – no negotiation with hostage takers.  He is simply saying, lets go back to a functioning Government (which includes raising the debt ceiling) and then we can discuss a strategy for the future of the economy. He will not compromise, and for the sake of good government, should not do so.

The Ryan idea of saying OK, we can go back to being a government for six weeks and we can raise the debt ceiling for six weeks while we start to cut social and health services is a dead-duck. Its rather like saying, we will give you your hostage back for a few days, but we will take them back again if you don’t do exactly as we ask. Who would agree to that?

Paul Ryan, the totally vacuous Chair of the House Budget Committee, has no new ideas. John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has no new ideas.  Neither are interested in an evidence based conversation. The democrats are criticized for having the idea of a strong and abiding commitment to equity through the redistribution of wealth – their core policy for the last sixty years. The lack of movement is seen as a reality TV show by the media who seem preoccupied with winners and losers. It looks to sensible people like the end of reason, which in fact it largely is.

So what will happen? Obama will not budge and all the evidence points to the Republicans failing to win the argument, so no deal. The US will default and then the President will act unilaterally and be subject to impeachment.

Aside from the economic consequence of all of this, there are consequences for our understanding of government and governance. The US Congress is dysfunctional – not just as a result of this current debacle but from the whole period since the middle of Bush 2’s second term. Agreed, Obama is a weak and ineffective President (good on promise and imagination, weak of execution) – but only Johnson could be seen to be a President who could stick handle this kind of nonsense.  The most worrying consequence of all of this is that the US can be seen not to have a Government that anyone could take seriously.

27th September - Al Gore Day in Memory of Inconvenient Un-Truths

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a political agency that uses science to make a particular political case for change. It is not an independent scientific agency. It does not conduct research. It does not consult with all of the worlds leading climate scientists. It makes use of non-peer reviewed materials to justify some its claims. It makes significant mistakes. It is actively pursuing an agenda. Not all of those who contribute to its work are free of conflict of interest – several work or are senior consultants to the World Wild Life Fund, which also has an agenda. Its Summary for Policy Makers is edited from the original science based submission to reflect the agenda of UN member governments.

This week the IPCC will begin the release of its fifth assessment of the state of the worlds climate. It will accept that no significant increase in surface temperatures have occurred for between fifteen and twenty years and that the climate models it uses for its scenarios are flawed – constantly overestimate both the rate and degree of warming. Nonetheless, it will stick to its guns that the primary cause of warming in the current age is man and that CO2 emissions are what we should focus on. It will issue dire warnings that urgent action is needed.

IPCC vice chair Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria in Canada, co-wrote a paper published in Nature Climate Change that said climate models had "significantly" overestimated global warming over the last 20 years — and especially for the last 15 years, which coincides with the onset of the hiatus in rising temperatures.

Judith Curry, a climatologist who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was involved in the third IPCC assessment, which was published in 2001. But now she accuses the organization of intellectual arrogance and bias. "All other things being equal, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will have a warming effect on the planet," Curry said. "However, all things are never equal, and what we are seeing is natural climate variability dominating over human impact."

Roger Pielke Jr., a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder is also a vocal critic of the climate change establishment in general and the IPCC in particular. He asks this simple question: “how is it that this broad community of researchers -- full of bright and thoughtful people -- allowed intolerant activists who make false claims to certainty to become the public face of the field?”. He cites IPCC in particular (see here).

We have been here before. Governments through the IPCC are pursuing an agenda that seeks to give them permission to introduce new taxes, to make strategic investments in “green energy” and penalize the oil, gas, coal, energy and mining industries. They seek a license for carbon taxes and opportunistic investments that fuel the wind, solar and renewable fuels lobbies -  despite the consistent failure of wind and solar to produce affordable, market-based solutions. It is an agenda for wealth transfer – with developed countries being asked to pay a premium to developing countries for their “past carbon sins”. It is also an agenda for increased energy poverty in the developed world.

So I for one will not be surprised to hear that unless we act now we are all doomed. We should name Friday – the day of the publication of the Summary for Policy Makers – Al Gore Day in memory of the inconvenient un-truths associated with his documentary. It will be a suitable commemoration.

Peak Renewables

EU members states have spent about €600 billion ($882bn) on renewable energy projects since 2005, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This funding was intended to help green energy achieve commercially competitive status and make a significant contribution to lowering carbon emissions and reducing the “threat” of climate change.

Now most European governments are backing off this strategy. The most recent shift came from the Czech government, which has decided to end all subsidies for new renewable energy projects at the end of this year. Almost all EU member states also have begun the process of rolling back and cutting green subsidies.

There are many reasons for this. Take the case of Spain. By failing to control the cost of guaranteed subsidies, the country has been saddled with €126bn of obligations to renewable-energy investors. Now that the Spanish government has dramatically curtailed these subsidies, even retrospectively, more than 50,000 solar entrepreneurs face financial disaster and bankruptcy.

Germany is another interesting case. During the past year, the wave of bankruptcies in solar has devastated the entire industry, while solar investors have lost almost €25bn on the stock market.
Now Germany plans to phase out subsidies altogether so as to stabilize energy costs, its solar industry is likely to disappear by the end of the decade. More than half of the world’s solar panels are installed in Germany. Yet for many weeks in December 2012 and January 2013, Germany’s 1.1 million solar power systems generated almost no electricity. During much of those overcast winter months, solar panels basically stopped generating electricity. To prevent blackouts, grid operators had to import nuclear energy from France and the Czech Republic and power up an old oil-fired power plant in Austria. This in a country that closed in nuclear plants in favour of solar.

It gets worse.  Almost 20 per cent of gas power plants in Germany have become unprofitable and face shutdown as massively subsidized renewables flood the electricity grid with preferential energy. To avoid blackouts, the government has had to subsidize uneconomic gas and coal power stations so that they can be used as back-up when the sun is not shining, the wind does not blow and renewables fail to generate sufficient electricity.

The EU also is also quietly rolling back its renewable agenda, which EU leaders now accept has been raising energy prices across the Continent. At a summit in Brussels in May, European  leaders indicated that they intended to prioritize the issue of affordable energy over cutting greenhouse gas emissions with the focus on stabilizing (and possibly lowering) energy costs. The EU summit signaled that Europe intended to restore its declining competitiveness by supporting the development of cheap energy, including shale gas, while cutting green energy subsidies.  Europe, The Washington Post recently suggested, “has become a green-energy basket case. Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.”

Given that the link between CO2 emissions and climate is weakening in the light of actual evidence (as opposed to models of these relationships) and that the global economy continues to struggle, economics is trumping ideology as many always said it would. Rather than seeing peak oil or peak coal, we are in fact witnessing the decline of the commitment to supporting renewable energy and for good reason.

Austerity and Reality

The primary cause of the 2007/8  financial crisis was private debt, especially the debts owned by private banks. This was especially focused on housing “scams” operated in concert by the banks – using bundled mortgages to create new kinds of fiscal instruments and a hitherto unknown level of debt-risk – which in turn led to a collapse of the housing market. The response to this was, world-wide, a confused fiscal policy ranging from austerity and budget cuts and stimulus coupled with low interest rates and pumping cash into the system (quantitative easing).

The new version of all of this is that it isn’t private debt that needs now to be tackled (e.g. by higher interest rates) but public debt that has to be dealt with. The rationale is that it is the level of public debt that impacts investor confidence (the so called “confidence fairy”). The trouble is that investor confidence is back as a high, but the pursuit of austerity continues. Put another way, this theory of action – the critical need to restore confidence justifies austerity – continues to drive policy, even though confidence is back.  Meanwhile, the banks continue to be problematic and are developing new forms of risk ventures which will lead, at some point in the next forty eight months, to a further debacle.

How can the basic causes of the crisis now be forgotten in the rush to austerity? Why is it that a disproven economic theory (we need to do magic to call up the confidence fairy) continues to drive policy makers?

The Future, Education and Alberta

When a journalist asked former British Prime Minister (1957-1963) Harold McMillan what politicians fear most, McMillan replied “events, dear boy, events”.  Futurists look at events as the basis for patterns and trends and seek to find meaning in these patterns so as to better understand both what is happening and how we might appropriately respond.

Currently, there are six patterns which are impacting the world in general and Alberta in particular. In Rethinking the Future (Murgatroyd, 2012 available on Kindle and in paperback at lulu.com) I explored these in depth. Here I will do so briefly, but will provide new information and insights which have emerged since the book was written.

Pattern 1: Demographics. The big pattern that will have a substantial impact on the world is the fact that we are likely to reach a global population of 10 billion by 2100, up from 6 billion in 2000. This raises issues of sustainability, equity and community but also challenges us to be innovative. A new book focused on the implications of this development by Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield, suggests that new values focused on sustainability, innovation and adaptability, equity and compassion will make it possible for 10 billion to occupy the planet. Others disagree and are seeking to constrain population growth by a variety of measures.

While this is the overarching challenge, there are other challenges. Canada’s birth rate is such that we are not replacing ourselves and will increasingly rely on immigration and innovation (especially improvements in productivity) if we are to sustain our quality of life, education, health care and social fabric. This is likely to lead to a doubling of immigration by 2030 and a tripling by 2050, changing the character of significant areas of Canada, especially those which are most attractive from an economic and quality of life point of view. This includes Alberta. Our schools will be even more multicultural and diverse than they are now. So too will our teaching profession.

People are living longer – with many more predicted to reach 90 and 100 than ever before. As communities support more and more seniors, the key issues for their support will be fragility and mental illness. They will place increasing burdens on health care systems in the developed world, but will also provide us with new sources of social support and resources. Grandparents will be a major source of family support and learning.

Pattern 2: Economics. Some have suggested that we are witnessing the “end of growth” (Heinberg, 2011; Rubin, 2012) – pointing to the low rates of GDP growth in most of the developed world, especially Europe. The rate of growth of the so-called BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has also slowed. This view suggests that a return to “normal” economic conditions before the implosion of the US and UK banking systems and the global financial crisis is now unlikely and we need to rethinking our economies for a slower or zero growth.

This seems overly pessimistic as a global view, though may be appropriate for Mediterranean EU States (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain – the PIGS economies) which also have very high unemployment rates, especially for young people.

As the US recovery emerges – GDP growth is app. 1.7% and housing starts and prices are rising – then the Canadian economy will respond. We can already see some sectors – forestry, construction and some service sectors – back to pre recession levels of economic activity. But it is clear that economic optimism has been replaced by economic caution. Also clear for Canadian entrepreneurs is that access to capital – the vital ingredient in building any business- is getting more and more difficult, not that it was ever easy.

Alberta’s economy remains healthy, despite weak demand for bitumen (until recently). The concern is medium to long term – where will Alberta sell its oil and gas now that the US is becoming increasingly energy self-reliant and growingly environmentally determined? If China is to be the primary market but we cannot get to market with efficient pipelines, will we price ourselves out of the heavy oil market for a time and will this slow economic growth in Alberta? Will these developments significantly slow or halt new capital projects in the oil sands?

Given uncertainties with respect to patterns of energy demand, all economies are seeking to diversify. Key to this is access to talented labour and innovation and growing the skills of entrepreneurship. The global war for talent is real and has an impact on economic growth – we seem to attract talent from around the world, but we need to grow more of our own Alberta talent and to retain all the available talent within the Province. As a nation we are also not very good at innovation (Conference Board of Canada, 2013) – we need to get much better if we are to compete on the global stage.

Pattern 3: Environment and Sustainability. There is no doubt that most countries need to do more to support sustainable living, climate change mitigation, land and air stewardship and the management of the watershed and water supplies. As we move to a global population of 10 billion, we need to understand that water, forested lands, land itself are no longer abundant but are in fact scarce. There is strong global support for sustainability as a core value of the 21^st century.

According to the Conference Board[i], Canada ranks 15th out of 17 peer countries on its environmental performance report card. Canada's record in several areas (climate change, energy intensity, smog, and waste production) drags down its comparative performance. Only Australia and the U.S. rank below Canada. The top three performers are France, Norway, and Sweden.

It is not all bad news. Canada has the world's largest area of forest certified to third-party sustainable forest certification. Canada is one of the best performers for the intensity of use of forest resources. Only Japan ranks ahead of Canada, with a lower percentage of timber cut relative to forest growth. We are also making progress in decoupling economic growth and CO2 emissions and are in fact reducing the rate of growth of emissions.

Increasingly, civil society is being evaluated not just in terms of the well-being and wealth of its citizens but also the health and sustainability of the environment. Alberta is challenged here – our oil sands are seen by many around the world as a blight on the planet. Despite the many efforts being made to strengthen our commitments and champion our achievements for environmental sustainability, we are losing the confidence of many that we take this work seriously. We are not the only jurisdiction facing this challenge, which is a defining challenge for the Government of Canada and Alberta.

Education is key to sustainability – and we need to do more in our schools to help students and communities understand the impact they have on nature and the impact nature can have on them, as the recent storms in southern Alberta demonstrate.

Pattern 4: Power and Politics. Globally there are struggles for a rethinking of power and authority within and between nations. In the Middle East this shows itself in struggles to both establish and sustain democracy. In Asia it is about finding balance between national authority and local autonomy. In Europe it is about finding the balance between technocracy, multinational control and nationhood. Globally there is a search for new models for citizenship, democracy, authority and new ways of securing public good.

It is clear that many hitherto effective systems are not performing well. The case of the United States congress, the European Union, the IMF and World Bank are all case studies of established systems in need of major change.

A part of the driver, at least in the developed world, for the challenge to existing political structures is the new global economy with global drivers for economic policy. Many of the major issues faced by governments – integrity of financial systems, climate change, labour mobility, immigration, terrorism – all require multinational responses. But most of our multinational agencies – the UN, for example – have performed poorly in the face of these challenges.

Another key driver for the rethinking of politics is the sense of disengagement or alienation many feel from the decisions that most affect them. Rebooting democracy is in part a response to alienation and lack of participation. One frontier is education, with Britain moving schools out of the control of local education authorities and into the hands of social enterprise. The recent focus in Alberta on Charter schools has worrying echoes of these developments.

Pattern 5: Technology. New substances, like graphene, or new approaches to the use of stem cells in the treatment of health conditions are beginning to have transformative impacts on many sectors of society. Britain, for example, is considering permitting the “three parent baby” -   replacing defective mitochondrial DNA of one woman with that of another in an embryo. Graphene – a microthin substance 200x stronger than steel – will soon replace silicon and other metals in cell phones, airplanes, cars and every day appliances. Disruptive technologies are emerging quickly.

In education, online learning and personalized learning are the “new black”, with substantial private sector investments now taking place K-PhD with the underlying assumption that technology alone will produce transformation in schools, as it is doing in health care.  Education systems are now targets for global corporations seeking sources of new revenue as traditional revenues decline – as can be seen in the educational strategy being pursued by Pearson, the world’s largest publisher.

Pattern 6: Identify and Self. A number of factors are leading young people around the world to feel vulnerable. This is shown in growing rates of depression and anxiety, suicide and obesity amongst young people. Indeed, challenges to children’s health are so serious that many public health experts see the current generation of parents as being the first who will live longer than many of their sons and daughters.

A strong self of self is weakened by prolonged unemployment, a growing feature of many developed economies. It is also weakened by a sense of environmental vulnerability, changes to our understanding of family and a social shift towards the always connected and yet always alone. As adolescence struggle to make sense of their world and themselves, their progress will be hampered by expectations that they will both look after their parents who will live longer, work harder and more productively in a shrinking workforce and contribute more to society through taxation and social enterprise. Growing up has always been a challenge for many young people – it seems to be getting tougher.

The Good News

Good news abounds. People are living longer, healthier lives. We seem to be getting closer to new treatments for chronic diseases and breakthroughs in stem cell research bode well for new approaches to health.

Fewer people live in poverty than was the case just a decade ago, though inequity is increasing. Despite continuing fears of global warming and evidence that it is, there has been no significant increase in global average surface temperatures since 1998. While some animal, fish and bird species are under threat, we discover new species at a faster rate than we document species loss. Storms continue to show the power of nature, but in North America, the frequency of hurricanes is lower than it has been since records began.

Though wars and civil strife continue, there are actually fewer so far in the twenty first century than at this stage in the twentieth. We also seem better able to find resolution to economic wars through enhanced global cooperation.

The In Between Time

But there is no doubt that we are living in an “in between time”. This is a time between one world order and way of understanding our place in the world and a new world order and the emergence of a different understanding of how we are connected to others and of our place in the world. Educators need to help students understand these six patterns and their interactions, since they will impact them all. We also need to enable active citizenship and citizen engagement as a key outcome of schooling. Given that “the future isn’t what it used to be” (Yogi Berra), we need students to create the Alberta the world needs to see.

Notes and References

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[i] See http://www.globe-net.com/articles/2013/april/5/how-canada-performs-new-report-rates-canada's-innovation-capacity/ April 4, 2013

Murgatroyd, S (2012) Rethinking the Future - Six Patterns Shaping The New Renaissance. Edmonton: futureTHINK Press.

From Public Good to Social Enterprise and Profit - Is This a Good Thing?

England is rapidly moving to a social enterprise model for the delivery of learning at all levels of its education system. By January 2013 some 2,600 English schools (12% of all schools and over 50% of all English High Schools) had opted out of the control of Local Education Authorities (equivalent to an Alberta School Board) and are free to set their own admission standards, recruit teachers to teach (including teachers without a teaching qualification), set teacher pay levels and receive the same funds as a publicly managed school would receive. There are 28 local authorities where at least 1 in 5 schools is now an open academy. In almost all of the 129 local authorities, at least 1 in 5 secondary schools is an open academy. There are 10 local authorities where at least 1 in 5 primary schools is now an open primary academy. Schools are converting all the time – by May of 2013 an additional 150 schools had converted.

At this time academies are not for profit organizations. The ruling Conservative Party has made clear that, should they win an outright majority in the next election, academies can elect to become for profit organizations.

Similar developments are occurring in Sweden, where Free Schools have been operating since 1992. By 2010 some 75% of Swedish school students attended a school owned and operated by a for profit company, subsidized by the States grant of per pupil funding.

Not all is well in Sweden. In 2013 JB Education, which supports the education of over 10,000 students in Free Schools in Sweden indicated that it was to close several of its schools since it could no longer fund these “loss making operations”. Some of Sweden’s private school companies operate schools in the UK. 

Charter schools are similar to academies in England and Free Schools in Sweden. Alberta has just thirteen Charter Schools, all of which are not for profit.

Private sector investments in education K-12 are rising. Both Pearson and News Corp are now investing directly in owning school systems and other investments are focused on technology. In the US alone in 2012 educational investment topped $1 billion, including investments in post-secondary education systems.

What is happening here in England is very simple. Public assets and responsibilities are being transferred initially to non-profit organizations which are building brand and presence so as to get ready for their future for profit status. The country is consciously shifting from a model of education "as a public good" to a model of education "which is a private social enterprise" subsidized in the name of public good. Control has shifted from elected public officials at a local level - the Local Education Authority - to bureaucrats for a national government, who take their instructions from a Minister appointed by the Crown. Removing local control and contracting out the future of a society is essentially what is happening here.

Several issues arise, but these three strike me as worth of exploration:

1. What are the benefits of a social enterprise approach, especially one which is likely to lead to privatization - the declared aim of the UK Conservative Party? Are the benefits to be experienced by learners, the community and society or is it simply a means of transfeering public funds to private interests?

2. What is lost to a community and society by ceding control of a major future resource - the knowledge and skills capacity of nation - to third parties?

3. What happens, as is now the case in Sweden, when some of the major "owners" decide that they can no longer take the losses of an education system and hand back their assets to the State or a new private sector player?

A related example to this is the debacle over what we refer to as P3's (public-private partnerships) but which the UK refers to as the Public Finance Initiative (PFI). By 2014 the value of the PFI sector in the UK will be app.  ₤140 billion and will eventually cost in excess of  ₤300 billion. But there all sorts of issues. In the National Health Service (NHS), where the PFI took a strong hold, there are challenges.  Barts Health NHS Trust in London says the construction of new medical facilities at its two main sites will cost £1.1bn, but the document reveals that the eventual cost will be £7.1bn by the time the contract is fully paid off in 2048-49. That will cost the trust an average of £115m a year at today's prices for the entire duration of the contract. To pay for this staff costs will need to be reduced - nurses versus profit will become a real challenge.This has already raised a red flag in the eyes of the Public Accounts Committee.

Further, when a school or building built with a P3 is no longer needed, payments still have to be made. What sense is there in this?

There are complex challenges here, I know - governments are seeking to manage expenditure, but what looks superficially like a smart move may in fact be very costly and not just in terms of money.

Understanding the Psychology of Heretics

I have been wondering why otherwise thoughtful, talented and highly educated people adopt beliefs which are difficult to defend.

This triggered by interest in a book by Will Storr called Heretics – Adventures with the Enemies of Science (London: Picador, 2013). The talented journalist and author looks at believers in homeopathy, deniers of climate change, those who believe hearing voices is a natural phenomenon and can be treated by listening to the voices and talking back rather than psychiatric treatments and many others. Why this book is interesting is because it seeks to understand the psychological process by which someone develops and clings to a view despite the fact that the evidence and science is against them.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, has also been exploring this theme in his New York Times blog site and in some of his columns. He wonders why, in the face of irrefutable evidence that they are wrong, those who support austerity in Europe continue to do so. He also wonders why economists who are convinced that quantitative easing as practiced by the US Federal Reserve will “obviously” lead to inflation when in fact there is no evidence supporting this view.

Storr suggests and discusses these conclusions:

1. We each develop, for those issues in which we have an interest, a mental model of reality and truth – our map of salience. This map is based on a variety of things – education, experience, observation, the views of individuals who are significant to us, opposition to the views of those we dislike and so on.
2. As we develop a map of salience, we seek out (consciously or unconsciously) evidence which reinforces our map and exclude or dispute that which does not. That is, we seek out selective evidence in support of our map of salience. This process in psychology is known as confirmation bias.
3. The longer we build our map of salience, the more it becomes our “virtual reality” – the way we see this issue or range of issues. Those who believe in homeopathy cannot imagine their world view to be wrong – “homeopathy can cure cancer!” (it cant and in several countries it is illegal to make this claim as a practitioner of homeopathy).
4. We don’t stop just at selective evidence gathering. We also create evidence by telling ourselves or sharing stories we understand to be true, even thought they are not. For example, the stories told by those who have been abducted by aliens or have seen UFO’s. These stories are powerfully held, told and shared and those who tell them are unshakable in their belief that they are true. This we can refer to as “confabulation”  - defined as “to fill in gaps in one's memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts”.
5. But we are not finished. Individuals then begin to practice what we psychologists call the “sense stopping rule”.  We ignore everything that runs counter to our map of salience and our confabulated stories (confirmation bias) and we scrutinize evidence from our opponents more rigorously than we scrutinize our own claims, data and stories – that is, we are simply unwilling to accept a different map of salience from our own. 

Storr’s book is written as a narrative of his encounter with mavericks, heretics and hucksters. Its not an easy book to read, but it is insightful. He suggests that “the world as we know it began in the 18^th century” with the development of an understanding of the scientific method and process and the growth of the Enlightenment. Science rescued man from the tyranny of beliefs alone and enabled mankind to test their understanding of the world in systematic, thorough and very focused ways. Through science, mankind has been able to develop a set of maps of salience which are routed in evidence which is independent of belief systems, confirmation bias , the sense stopping rule and confabulation. At least we think it is.

When scientists begin to show signs of confabulation, confirmation bias and the sense stopping rule – what do we now do? This is Paul Krugman’s point. When this occurs, our trust in the particular scientist (in this case an economist) and more generally in science begins to be eroded.

One of my own problems with some climate scientists is their growing use of confabulation, their clear bias on the basis of “consensus” and the evidence of sense stopping. Not all of the climate scientists can be seen to practice these things, but some significant players can. Just as Paul Krugman wonders what the “science” of economics will become when we have these behaviours occurring, so I wonder what will become of science itself.

Dan Brown's Inferno and the Future of Mankind

Dan Brown’s new novel Inferno is, as all of his novels are, a literary mess. It’s a ramble through bits of history, literature, architecture, science and politics with a thriller thrown in. But what this book will do, apart from being the basis for a blockbuster film and a major best seller, is help put into people’s consciousness the challenge of our demography.

Demography at the grand scale tells us that we are reaching towards 9-11 billion people existing together on the planet by 2050 – up from the 7.9 billion living on the planet now. The premise of Dan Brown’s thriller is that this figure is unsustainable – creating unbearable pressures on the environment, global food supplies, and energy resources. Something has to be done and his thriller is based on a strategy for culling the global population based on genetic engineering by means of a vector based virus.

Some facts will help. The population is expanding, as the UN graph below shows. Starting from 1800, the graph shows global population expansion through to 2004 and then the three scenarios which follow are varying estimates of what is likely to happen to the end of the century. Two scenarios show that, as the overall health and wealth of the global population rises then birth rates decline and the species finds some balance with the planet. The red scenario suggests that this doesn’t happen and the human herd simply grows exponentially.

The population is getting both wealthier and healthier, as the powerful video by Hans Rossling shows (see here).

A new study of demography by Danny Dorling (Population 10 Billion – The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It. London: Constable and Robinson, 2013), which is much better written than Dan Brown’s novel (but will get less attention), makes clear that population will stabilize as individuals realize that sustainability is something that they can act on without the need for global Kyoto like agreements and companies realize that all people on earth seek the same things and to create these sustainable life-styles is a fantastic capitalist opportunity. This is also the theme of the book we published by Alan Knight (Rethinking Corporate Sustainability – If Only We Ran the Planet Like a Shop – available here). Packed full of counter-intuitive ideas and observations, Dorling’s book is a tool kit to prepare for the future and to help us ask the right questions.

But what are the right questions? I would suggest that there are five:

1. What actions can we as individuals and as society take to reduce inequity and increase equity?
2. What actions can we take to reduce consumption and waste and increase the utilization of currently “in use” resources?
3. What actions can we take to better manage our own wellness and health?
4. What actions do we need to take to promote and develop happiness, wellbeing and community?
5. What actions do we need to take to look after the land, forests and water supplies on which we all depend?

The future depends on innovative approaches to sustainable living. The simple and politically attractive solutions – reduce C02 emissions by 40% by 2030 (50% if everyone agrees to do this together, which is the EU’s policy position) – make no sense since they will make no difference to the climate and will disrupt just some aspects of life (e.g. food supply chains, transport systems) unnecessarily. The real challenge is to develop a sense of personal responsibility for our collective future.

Certainly, some policy positions from governments would help – like making austerity apply to the rich rather than the poor, forcing companies to do more than focusing on profitability and requiring communities to see health as an issue of prevention than one of supply. But these are the outcomes of a shift in attitude – it is this shift that will make the difference.

Alan Knight’s key point is that using fear to shift attitudes isn’t working. If we use opportunity instead, it may work better. For example, if companies stopped selling everything and started renting those things we only use occasionally this would help. Its 10 billion small actions that will make the wellbeing of 10 billion people possible.

So as you snuggle down to read Dan Brown’s badly written but hugely popular book give a thought to the real issue of our collective future. That is what he is really trying to write about.