America 3.0

I don’t mean to be negative but….

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I know this is a cousin to stealing but you need to see this. I remember when those who warned of the danger were ignored or punished.

Seventeen years ago, Bernard Connolly foretold the misery that awaited the European Union. Given that he was an instrumental figure in the EU bureaucracy and publicly expressed his doubts in a book called “The Rotten Heart of Europe,” he was promptly fired. Mr. Connolly takes no pleasure now in having seen his prediction come true. And he takes no comfort in the view, prevalent in many quarters, that the EU has passed through the worst of its crisis and is on the cusp of revival.

As far as Mr. Connolly is concerned, Europe’s heart is still rotting away.

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Walter Russell Mead: Channeling America 3.0???

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3D printers, driverless cars, nanotech: the 21st century looks to be even more different from the 20th century than the 20th was from the 19th. American politics and institutions are going to change much more rapidly than most pundits and politicos can yet understand.

Walter Russell Mead

This quote is uncannily congruent the argument of the forthcoming book, America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century – Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come by Jim Bennett and me.

Walter Russell Mead’s wicked good blog Via Meadia has many posts which track closely with the arguments Jim and I are making. I am sure all this great material will end up in a forthcoming book by him about the demise of the Blue Model (a term he invented) and what is coming next.

I am going to shamelessly recycle this: “the 21st century looks to be even more different from the 20th century than the 20th was from the 19th.” This is a very pithy observation which captures our vision of America 3.0, which of course we cannot really predict with a lot of detail. As Bruce Sterling wisely said:

Nothing obsolesces like “the future.” Nothing burns out quite so quickly as a high tech avant-garde. Technology doesn’t glide into the streamlined world of tomorrow. It jolts and limps, all crutches and stilts, just like its ancient patron, the god Hephaestos.

Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years.

Still, we have to imagine the future, not so we will be correct then, but so we can plan, think, and act now. We also have to imagine the future so we don’t think today’s setbacks, as serious as they may be, are the apocalypse. Everyone reading this will be dead in 100 years, but our descendants will be alive, and they will have in part what we passed on to them. They will see us as living in a patch of history with a label and summed up in a few paragraphs. This is a phase, as is every other period in history.

I will confidently predict, as Mead does, that the pace of change will be faster than ever before. Moore’s Law will be in force for a long time to come, I hope.

What is particularly cool about the Mead quote, almost suggesting some kind of brain-meld via the astral plane between Mead and Bennett-Lotus, is the reference to “3D printers, driverless cars, nanotech” — each of these figure prominently in our first Chapter, America in 2040. One muse, three authors?

If you have not read Mead’s two excellent books, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World and God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, you must do so. Get them soon, so you are done before our book comes out May 28, 2013.

Cross-posted on America 3.0.

The Liberal Welfare State is not Sustainable

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It is increasingly clear that the liberal welfare state is not sustainable in its current form, and its costs and inefficiencies are increasingly present and real and are putting huge burdens on our economy at every level. This can’t really go on. From here on, the Left has mostly to play a defensive game of retrenchment and reaction, and this is an exhausting game, especially for liberals.

Yuval Levin

This comment encapsulates part of the argument that Jim Bennett and I make in our forthcoming book, America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century – Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come.

The liberal welfare state is long past its peak. The question is, what next? We offer some predictions. But the main thing to consider is the transformative nature of the era we are living through. Both sides of the political spectrum are still stuck in 20th Century thinking, both thinking that the Blue Model can be tinkered with. It can’t. The challenge for Conservatives will be to figure out what they want to conserve and how to adapt their principles to the times. Progressives will need to figure out how to preserve their goals of protecting the weak and powerless using new methods, since the old ones are not working and will not continue to be popular once voters understand the burdens and costs.

Cross-posted on America 3.0.

America 3.0, The Future of Manufacturing and Employment

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In our upcoming book, America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century – Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come (available for pre-order here), Jim Bennett and Mike Lotus paint a word-picture of America in 2040, which is less a prediction and more an exercise in hopeful and forward-looking thinking for conservatives and libertarians. We include predictions regarding the impact of distributed manufacturing.

The recent article in Wired by Kevin Kelly entitled Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs makes similar points. Here are two good quotes from Kelly:

Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within 5 miles of where they are needed.
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It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

It is important to remember that technological change destroys categories of jobs, and creates new ones that literally cannot be imagined yet.

We are going to be facing a tidal wave of creative destruction in the years immediately ahead.

Our book offers some ideas about why we are well suited to benefit from these changes, and how to navigate the rapids to get from here to there.

Stand by for very interesting times.

America 3.0 — Now Available for Pre-Order

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As previously announced, Jim Bennett and Mike Lotus (a/k/a Lexington Green), have co-authored a book:

America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century – Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come.

The book is currently in the hands of our publisher, Encounter Books and editing is underway.

There is now an Amazon pre-order page for the book.

All such early orders would be very greatly appreciated.

The book is coming out in May. Promotional plans are chugging away. Any ideas anyone may have would be very much appreciated, and can be left in the comments on this post or future posts related to the book.

A friend asked for a three sentence summary. This is what I came up with:

America’s greatest days are yet to come. Just as the world of family farms and small businesses, America 1.0, gave way to the industrialized world of big cities, big business, big labor unions and big government, America 2.0, we are now moving into a new world of immense productivity, rapid technological progress, greater scope for individual and family-scale autonomy, and a leaner and strictly limited government. The cultural roots of the American people go back at least fifteen centuries, and make us individualistic, enterprising, and liberty-loving, equipping us to prosper in the upcoming America 3.0.

We will be posting frequently in the months ahead (both here and on the book’s own blog) about the America 3.0 and its arguments, and how the themes in the book relate to current events, to efforts to devise a long term strategy for the political Right in America, or to other writers or books which interest us or influenced us.

We anticipate setting up a Facebook and Twitter account for the book as well.

Stand by!