Politics
Entries related to things political.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/22/2007 - 23:58
World War III?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/22/2007 - 20:55Gavin Kennedy, in his blog, Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy criticizes my by recent blog post Unshackling Adam Smith’s invisible hand – Carbon Credits, entitling his post, How to Start World War III & IV. Does he really believe that tying trade policies to energy consumption or environmental policies would start World War III & IV?
NAFTA's explicit inclusion of environmental issues in dispute settlement jurisdiction didn’t start a World War. Why would they in other trade agreements? It appears as if Kennedy is just being a polemicist, not seriously interested in thinking seriously about how trade policies affect our world.
Unshackling Adam Smith’s invisible hand – Carbon Credits
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/22/2007 - 09:52After I wrote my blog piece, The Innovation Invitation, Jock Gill called me up and we had an interesting talk about it. He pointed out that the invitation to innovate should not be restricted new technology changing the way we communicate on campaigns. We need innovative ideas that transcend campaigning and go beyond relying solely on technology to solve our problems.
The conversation drifted to Adam Smith, and how the political spectrum is not a line, but a circle. The further to the left or right you go, the closer to those on the other side you end up. I think an interesting illustration of this is what I’ll call The Progressive Capitalist.
I must admit, I’ve only read very brief passages of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, so I may be off based on some of my observations. Smith’s had big concerns about fairness and normative cultural values. Jock argued that Smith believed in a local marketplace, with local ownership and was opposed to absentee ownership and remote accumulation of capital. In a world of large multinational corporations, the market is no longer local. The playing field is not fair. A local community can no longer exert its cultural values on the businesses in its locality.
Indeed, if we are going to allow Adam Smith’s invisible hand to have an effect, we need to avoid entering trade agreements that give other countries unfair competitive advantage. For example, a country that puts disproportionate amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a country that is essentially robbing its neighbors of a clean air and a healthy climate has an unfair advantage that would be unacceptable to Adam Smith. Instead, trade agreements should include fairness. If we want to unshackle Adam Smith’s invisible hand, we should tie our trade agreements to fairness. If we want to see a real market force, let’s require all imports to be carbon neutral. Instead of tariffs, companies would need to buy carbon offsets. Let’s tie Kyoto to all our trade agreements.
This is just a start. We should spend time thinking about how to make sure that in an increasingly flat world, Adam Smith’s invisible hand can help maximize human happiness.
(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)
The Innovation Invitation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 05/21/2007 - 09:18I have always been fascinated by innovation. It is what America was built on, has helped keep America strong, and I believe is where our strength in the future lies. I’ve always been an early adopter of technology and seek to add my own innovations.
For me, and I believe for many others, that was one of the things that made the 2004 Presidential cycle so exciting. There were great innovations in the use of the Internet. What was most important about those innovations is that everyone was invited to help innovate.
At the 2006 Personal Democracy Forum, one of the great, unanswered questions was, what will be the breakthrough technological innovation of the 2008 Presidential cycle. No one had a compelling answer. At the Media in Transition conference as well as at Personal Democracy Forum this year, I found myself talking with many people about the 2008 Presidential cycle. There was a sense of disappointment that isn’t any great innovation going on.
PDF2007 : The Keeping It Personal Awards
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/20/2007 - 15:26Shortly before Personal Democracy Forum this year, I wrote a blog post about keeping Personal Democracy Forum Personal. There were many great speakers at PDF this year, some big names, with important things to say. Yet for me, there were a few that stood out in terms of keeping it personal.
First, was Danah Boyd. She rocked. She spoke about online social networks, like Facebook and MySpace. She spoke about how when people listed someone as a friend, it didn’t mean that they were personal friends, it was more about respect and admiration, as well as a way for the individual to communicate to others who and what is important to them. She noted that teens today do not have the places to hang out the way I did when I was a teenager.
Back then, we all went and hung out on Spring Street. Depending on your social circle, you hung out at Pizza House or Colonial Pizza. Some kids slipped into the Purple Pub or the American Legion. Others would go to the Williams College Student Union and visit the snack bar or the coffeehouse or radio station in the basement. In college, there were similar places to hang out, much of it centered around the student union.
But for kids today, these sort of options are rapidly disappearing, and the places where kids hang out, Boyd asserted, are MySpace and Facebook. So, if a politician wants to reach this demographic, they need to visit these spaces. They need to stop by and do the equivalent of shaking hands, which is leaving notes on people’s walls.
Seth Godin takes the second Keeping It Personal award for posing the question of if it’s time to flip the funnel. He spoke about the TV industrial complex. They have been telling candidates for years that the way to get the message out is to buy ads to raise donations so you can buy more ads to get elected and then buy more ads to get re-elected, and so on. Flip the funnel. Instead of filtering dollars down to the campaign make the funnel a megaphone and get your supporters to spread your message virally. You give up a little control, but you get conversation and a cumulative advantage. Be remarkable so that your supporters will remark and spread your message.
The third Keeping It Personal award goes to the ‘Is Cyberspace Colorblind’ panel. Chris Rabb did his standard spiel about people owning the privilege that got them to where they are. Things got a bit heated between the panel and some of the privileged white male bloggers in the audience, but all in all it was a great reminder to everyone that everyone else you run into on the Internet, everyone you are trying to reach out to, might not look the same as you, might have different concerns and different ways of connecting. Could the discussion have gone further and explored more ways of addressing different communities online? Sure. But the bottom line that I took away from the discussion was a reaffirmation of one of my favorite points. Go out and read blogs from people who belong to communities different from your own. We will all better off if we do that.
The fourth Keeping It Personal award goes to the Social Networks, Tipping Points and Organizing. There was concrete data there and good and useful information about how to engage the social networks, particularly in terms of dealing with connectors to expand the size of the audience online. For me personally, it was probably the most useful session.
I was going to end with that, but then today, I went to an unconference session on online/offline integration and how we measure effectiveness of online campaigns. Beka from Greenpeace spoke about the house party program that she had done. She gave a detailed description of the program and what worked to make it effective. It was the sort of houseparty program that we need to see more of that empowered volunteers and invited them to become more active.
To me, the key idea of much of this is relates to the discussions I’ve been having about the Presidential elections. In 2004, the campaigns, with the Dean campaign as a prime example, invited supporters to be innovative. In 2008, so far, the campaigns are looking at the innovations from the 2004 cycle and seem to be thinking that if they repeat those innovations, they will be successful. Yet what made a difference in the 2004 cycle wasn’t the innovations that volunteers came up with. It was the invitation to innovate. It was making the campaigns personal through that invitation. It was great to see people who seemed to understand the importance of inviting everyone in, even if that isn’t as apparent in the 2008 Presidential campaigns.
(Tags: pdf2007)
