Excellent post! As Americans our spiritual ancestors are the pirates and free thinkers, those who are grounded in the past and would apply realizable ideals to our future. If there was ever a moment when the example of Theodore Roosevelt is apt, it's arguably now. He was able to bridge the worlds of action and thought, and, in today's terms was a total badass.
An idea that is good its own right is not predestined to find its way into policy: there’s a lot of the environment and chance to let it come to “fruition”. In fact some ideas are realized only with year/decades of policy investment: a real long game.
@Frank: what are some ideas/nascent policy initiatives strike you as interesting /“piratical”?
At the top-most level, we need to refocus everything to address the competence crisis. Too many things right now are just mediocre, frustrating, corrupt, or just don't work. It's true of government, the private economy, and the quasi-public space like media and academia too. That means moving past the weak glue still holding our current political coalitions together, the war over which problems government and private entities should solve. We need to be talking more instead about what exactly we need to do to solve the problems instead.
Just make stuff work. Make institutions actually do what they say on the label. Restore trust by actually earning it. Make leaders actually lead. That's the organizing principle people want!
That's a great message, but it's also pretty abstract. Here are some random specifics.
Find ways to make corporations treat employees less like widgets and be less frustrating to the rest of us without breaking market incentives. A lot of anger boiling up right now isn't because of things the government directly does, but that people's experience with authority is their boss or powerful firms they deal with. Fix that, give better better lives, and the anger goes away. Combat Cory Doctorow's cycle of degradation. Make companies treat people better around layoffs (more notice, no humiliating rituals escorting out with security with a box after twenty years of loyalty). Create clear and fair rules that don't make the government national micromanager, making the market work better.
Reform Congress. I get nervous about messing with the Constitutional order, and this one is going to be controversial and difficult to get the details right. But the institution no longer works (see Yuval Levin). We need a more democratic institution that actually can get thing done and take leadership and responsibility.
Police licensing. The obvious solution to lack of trust in police is licensing. Lawyers need licensing. Doctors do. In a lot of places hairdressers do! Why don't we require police to carry licenses to ensure they're trained and that bad ones can't move to a new jurisdiction? Instead of pro or anti police, better police that work.
There are a lot of places we can come up with better and clearer rules and policies built around the simple idea of 1) make people in charge of things run them well and do what they're supposed to do, and 2) make things work.
Excellent post! As Americans our spiritual ancestors are the pirates and free thinkers, those who are grounded in the past and would apply realizable ideals to our future. If there was ever a moment when the example of Theodore Roosevelt is apt, it's arguably now. He was able to bridge the worlds of action and thought, and, in today's terms was a total badass.
An idea that is good its own right is not predestined to find its way into policy: there’s a lot of the environment and chance to let it come to “fruition”. In fact some ideas are realized only with year/decades of policy investment: a real long game.
@Frank: what are some ideas/nascent policy initiatives strike you as interesting /“piratical”?
At the top-most level, we need to refocus everything to address the competence crisis. Too many things right now are just mediocre, frustrating, corrupt, or just don't work. It's true of government, the private economy, and the quasi-public space like media and academia too. That means moving past the weak glue still holding our current political coalitions together, the war over which problems government and private entities should solve. We need to be talking more instead about what exactly we need to do to solve the problems instead.
Just make stuff work. Make institutions actually do what they say on the label. Restore trust by actually earning it. Make leaders actually lead. That's the organizing principle people want!
That's a great message, but it's also pretty abstract. Here are some random specifics.
Find ways to make corporations treat employees less like widgets and be less frustrating to the rest of us without breaking market incentives. A lot of anger boiling up right now isn't because of things the government directly does, but that people's experience with authority is their boss or powerful firms they deal with. Fix that, give better better lives, and the anger goes away. Combat Cory Doctorow's cycle of degradation. Make companies treat people better around layoffs (more notice, no humiliating rituals escorting out with security with a box after twenty years of loyalty). Create clear and fair rules that don't make the government national micromanager, making the market work better.
Reform Congress. I get nervous about messing with the Constitutional order, and this one is going to be controversial and difficult to get the details right. But the institution no longer works (see Yuval Levin). We need a more democratic institution that actually can get thing done and take leadership and responsibility.
Police licensing. The obvious solution to lack of trust in police is licensing. Lawyers need licensing. Doctors do. In a lot of places hairdressers do! Why don't we require police to carry licenses to ensure they're trained and that bad ones can't move to a new jurisdiction? Instead of pro or anti police, better police that work.
There are a lot of places we can come up with better and clearer rules and policies built around the simple idea of 1) make people in charge of things run them well and do what they're supposed to do, and 2) make things work.
Makes me want to become a pirate!
Great ideas.