Deciding Our Future

Back in 1982, as an assignment in a graduate long-range planning course, I was asked to write a scenario describing life in the U.S. in 2025.  I got a good grade from a senior long-range planner at the Congressional Budget Office, so my techniques must have been ok.  My three major predictions were that there would be a wall along the U.S. – Mexico border, that health care costs would consume 25 percent of the federal budget and be the major budget issue and that the current public education system would mainly be replaced by in-home education via computer access to “teaching machines.”  I missed by not including climate change, but back then, who did?  The Senate is today considering an immigration bill which would lengthen the already-begun wall by several hundred miles and raise the border patrol to 40,000, health care costs are consuming headlines everywhere, and educational computer hook-ups from homes to teaching software and master teachers are already popular in Alaska and Australia and spreading (they help cope with both distance and bad weather). By the way, back then, technology forecasters were already seeing distance-independent communications via satellites and cellular technologies and essentially free massive information storage and retrieval.  With proper tools and expertise and a little vision, long-range forecasting is fairly straightforward.  It’s doing something about what you see that’s hard.  Real societal change usually involves hard choices and significant changes in the political status quo.

Policy planners talk about three basic ways of making decisions: rational “top down” decision making; disjoint incrementalism, known commonly as “muddling through”; and decision process modification, in which the focus is not on what is to be achieved, but on how the decision is to be reached – it’s what you do when all else fails. Autocratic and totalitarian governments focus on the top down approach, but it’s only as good as the vision of the people doing the planning and lacks the ability to bring everyone to agreement on critical social issues.  Democracies are great on muddling through, which is usually a “drunkard’s walk” veering one way then another until some significant long term change is achieved with a fair degree of consensus; its problem is that the results achieved are popular but not always rational, and rational but unpopular results may never be achieved.  Emotions like fear and greed count as much or more than rationality in the decision process. The border wall is a current case in point.  Where emotional considerations are important, democracies do achieve things autocratic government fails at; slavery existed for millennia under autocratic regimes and continues in some of them, but was abolished in about one hundred years in democracies after they were attained.

In  Hot,  Flat and Crowded Tom Friedman comments that if he could only be dictator for a day, many of the problems contributing to adverse climate change could be solved immediately. Of course such a process would be impossible, but Friedman puts his finger on a key issue.  Climate change is happening rapidly, and decisions about it need to be made just as rapidly.  Already New York Mayor Bloomberg has announced a plan for sea walls and other measures for ameliorating the climate change impact, a signal that we are getting past the point of stopping major climate effects and arriving at a course of dealing with them as best we can.  That seems to be a growing consensus among climate scientists.  But the democratic debate grinds on, and private greed seems to continually outweigh public rationality.  We just may never get there by muddling through.

Economists would hold that our fundamental decisions are always determined by private greed, but biologists might differ.  Our fundamental drive, according to them, is toward survival.  Economics, with its celebration of that private greed, is a means toward that end, not a goal in itself. And enjoyment of greed is dependent on a surrounding society.  It is impossible to maintain a luxury mansion with servants and gourmet dining when society is collapsing about your ears.  That fact may be the irresistible force needed to move the slow motion machinery of democracy.  .  Forest fires have been consuming much of Colorado; two “once a century” tornados have hit the same Oklahoma town in ten years; I just got back from a 3 to 8 inch tropical downpour, depending on where you were, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in June when such things were never supposed to happen; droughts are blanketing Africa and Australia and China and parts of the U.S., and so on.  Nature is sending us warnings daily now, and this is only the beginning.  Sea walls around New York City are just a hint of what might come.  The time for denial is past.  But the democratic process grinds on.

We use fast-track procedures for trade negotiations, an area less significant than climate change.  It’s time to consider an equivalent process for climate change issues.  A fast-track process in which proposals by the President would be subject only to veto, not modification, by the Congress may be necessary.  To achieve that will require major changes to the membership of the Congress, and that as an explicit public issue needs to become a topic for our next elections.  Climate change denial is no longer a qualification for congressional membership.  Nature is not waiting for us to muddle through.