Let's Think about the Future

Amidst government shutdowns, mass layoffs caused by artificial intelligence, political assassinations and terrorist plots, this may not be the best time to think about our long term future. We need to focus on solving the multiple crises at hand. And if the current crises are not enough, our political leaders from President Trump and his MAGA base to Chuck Schumer and his progressive base, are thinking up new crises that they hope will distract the American people from their huge budget deficits and unpayable public debt.

But if we don’t start thinking about what kind of world we want to live in how will we ever be able to create that future world? What do we need to do now so that we will have that better future? The longer we delay starting the journey the longer it will take to achieve that better future. What do we need to include in the better future, what do we need to exclude? And even if our human nature makes it impossible to create a perfect future, maybe we can at least try to make it a little better.

A recent poll by Politico indicated that more Americans believe our best times are behind us rather than ahead of us. But I wonder what better times those poll respondents were thinking of; the 1970’s back when I was in college? With the Viet Nam War, SDS on campus and race riots across the country? The 1950s where TV’s Donna Reed and My Three Sons portrayed an idyllic America while blacks suffered under the bootheel of Jim Crow laws? The 1940’s with the horrors of World War Two and the atom bomb? The 30’s with the stock market crash and the Great Depression? World War One? The Gilded Age? Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan? The Civil War?  Just what better past were they thinking of?

The truth is that Americans have always had to struggle through tough times. Life on the frontier was hard. An immigrant’s life in the slums of New York City was hard. Low wages, long hours, discrimination. Why did they do it? Why did they come to America? There was no welfare system. There were no food stamps. There was no free medical care. Why? They came for the opportunity. The pursuit of happiness. And even if they knew that they would face a life of hardship and deprivation they also knew that they could create a better life for their children and grandchildren. 

So how did they do it? There were three critical factors that enabled our ancestors to remake America from an agricultural backwater into the most powerful and prosperous country in the world. Those factors were Incentives, Tools and Discipline. And if our ancestors could make a better America despite the challenges they faced, we can too.

Let’s talk about Incentives

It's not the happiness that makes us Americans. It’s the pursuit that makes us Americans. We cannot replicate the challenges our forefathers (and foremothers) faced. Nor would we want to. Each challenge they faced was distinctive. Unique. Each hardship they endured was different. They faced hunger and even starvation but they could endure those deprivations because they could see the rewards in a better future, even if it was not their future but that of their children. This was a powerful incentive.

But Americans have been told that these incentives no longer exist. They have been told that income and wealth has been pocketed by the one percenters leaving nothing for the rest of us. Americans have been told that their hard work and deferred gratification will not be rewarded. That their children will not have better lives. They are told that they need government (the power of government) to wrest these undeserved riches from the wealthiest in order to survive.

The result is that there is no incentive to study hard and learn so that you can be more productive and earn more money. There is no incentive to work long hours and save money that will earn less than the inflation rate. Why even bother to marry and raise a family if their future is even more deplorable than yours? What kind of incentive is that. It is the kind of incentive that motivates citizens to elect politicians that can give them money and benefits and subsidies and tax breaks and whatever they need to fill up the empty hole in their lives.

You cannot make your life better by placing your future (and that of your family) into the hands of politicians, you only make the lives of politicians better. During the recent government shutdown, the mainstream media wailed about the hunger that confronted the 42 million people who would not receive their SNAP benefits. SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Without government assistance those people would be near starvation. Those 42 million people are not free. If you are dependent on government for your daily bread, you are a subject of that government, not a citizen. Wouldn’t you rather be in charge of your life even though that comes with many risks and uncertainties than to be dependent on government? It does not require a malevolent government to make your life miserable, just an incompetent one.

And we must remember that incentives work for individuals and not for groups. If you work hard and get a promotion and a raise, you need to know that it was your hard work that earned you that promotion. That incentivizes you to continue to work hard and that is beneficial not only to you but also to your employer and to the country as a whole. But if you thought your promotion was due to your race or sex or ethnicity and not to your individual effort you would have no incentive to work hard and so neither your employer or the country would benefit from your promotion.

Given the right incentives you would be amazed at what people can accomplish. Given the wrong incentives they can be as stubborn as mules.

We need the Right Tools

The second essential characteristic needed to build that future America is opportunity and not just opportunity but the ability to take advantage of that opportunity. This will not be easy in the new Age of Artificial Intelligence. And all the onshoring projects that President Trump is trying to impose on US and foreign companies will not solve the problem. To be competitive, even with tariffs, manufacturers based in America will require high levels of automation – dark factories where no lights are needed because there are no humans on the factory floor. There will be no blue collar renaissance for unskilled high school graduates like we had in the fifties and sixties. But there is a critical shortage of highly skilled workers like welders and electricians that will be needed to keep those fancy machines running. The CEO of Ford recently said that he has 5,000 open positions for skilled workers that pay six figure salaries.

America went from an agricultural backwater to the most powerful and prosperous country in the world because we had the best educated people in the world. That is not the case now. Critics have noted that there are two major cohorts coming out of our educational system in the twenty-first century. One cohort (a minority unfortunately) are well educated and prepared for higher education or advanced training in skilled trades. The second cohort is relegated to poor performing public schools where educational excellence is secondary to ideological indoctrination. These children cannot read or do math at grade level and are ill-prepared to become productive adults. They lack the ability to take advantage of the opportunities that lie before them.

Reform of this dire situation creates two great educational challenges for us. One is to reform the basis of education into a meritocratic system that rewards accomplishments. American kids also need to be taught to love their country despite its flaws and that it is their job to make it better through good citizenship. The second task is to help a generation of young graduates confronting real life for the first time to understand that their education was biased anti-American indoctrination that left them unprepared for future challenges. Many from Gen Z (Zoomers as compared to Boomers) will come to this conclusion on their own as they mature and are forced to deal with reality but the damage already done is enormous.

Here's a question for you. How many CEOs of major corporations in America have advanced degrees in gender or ethnic studies? A Google search turned up empty. Not the same for STEM degrees. Many of the degrees granted at American colleges and universities are what I call grievance degrees. Gender or ethnic studies degrees or degrees in social work that emphasize victimhood and the need for government intervention instead of empowerment. These are not the tools that people need to make a better life. Foreigners don’t have time for such nonsense. The Association of International Educators reports that half of the STEM degrees awarded in 2019 went to international students even though they make up only about 5% of all students. More importantly, since 2000, more than half of America’s start-up companies valued at $1 billion or more have been founded or co-founded by immigrants. We need those immigrants to help America grow but we also need to develop our own home-grown entrepreneurs.

Success will require Discipline

President John Adams stated, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He went on to say, “Morality and virtue are the foundation of our republic and necessary for a society to be free.” A free society relies on the voluntary cooperation of an educated and motivated people. Other societies (autocratic, monarchical or theological) must compel people to do the right thing (or at least what the rulers consider to be the right thing).

The separation of church and state (a key component in Enlightenment philosophy and the basis of the first amendment) has led to the increasing secularization of America while at the same time allowing the acceptance of many different religions within the country. Along with these diverse religions has come the acceptance of the cultures related to those religions, what we call multiculturalism. This multitude of religions and cultures include some that are not in accord with our Western Civilization and sometimes are directly opposed to it. This has led to many on the left as well as left-leaning academia to reject Western Civilization and also to reject the basis of our American democracy.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in his book Morality that “A society is not simply a collection of individuals doing what they like so long as they do no harm to others. It has, essentially and inescapably, a foundation in shared beliefs about the right and the good.” He continued by citing a 1959 lecture by Lord Devlin who said, “without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist.” Multiculturalism is, he said, the abandonment of the idea of a national culture into which newcomers were expected to integrate.

Western Civilization, which the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture described as white culture,  emphasizes Individualism, the nuclear family, a protestant work ethic and an emphasis on the scientific method to drive innovation. These are not white cultural values, these are universal values that actually work. Western Civilization has lowered the child death rate to almost zero, has extended the lifespan of everyone, wiped out diseases and plagues that afflicted all peoples, and provided modern conveniences in transportation, communication and manufacturing.

These benefits didn’t just happen. It took a lot of work and discipline to make them happen. And it will take discipline to emphasize our American culture and to require newcomers to assimilate into that culture. Much of the division and turmoil which afflicts us these days comes from the abandonment of that common American culture. Scott Page wrote in his book The Difference that diversity (principally thought diversity) can be a very effective tool when the people share a common goal. Without that common goal the result is chaos. It will take discipline to reject that chaos.

Now we can think about The Future

I think that most of us want the same (or at least similar) things. We want the freedom to choose the direction of our life, our profession, our work, our hobbies. We want the ability to have financial security and we are willing to work hard to achieve that goal. We want to live in a safe environment. We want to be able to raise our families and educate our children so that they can have a good future too. This is not too much to ask. But it does not come easy. We must work hard and be willing to make the necessary sacrifices. We need the agency to control the direction of our lives. We need to understand that government (at the federal, state and local level) is necessary to provide the framework within which we live. It provides security and a justice system. But we also need to realize that the agency to control our own lives is diminished as the power of government increases so we need to limit the power of government. We need to understand that the power of government to take the wealth of some citizens to give money or benefits to other citizens does not empower the recipients of those benefits, it only empowers the government and the politicians that control it. I don’t care if someone else is fabulously wealthy as long as I get to keep my “go to hell” money. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have done a lot more to make my life better than Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Most of the work we need to do is repair work. There are some folks that want to tear down the entire structure and build an entirely new edifice based on new architectural designs such as those proposed by NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. But those designs are not new and I have seen them applied around the world. They don’t work. They are based on an unrealistic perception of how things work. How people react to their circumstances and incentives that they encounter. They would create a world you wouldn’t want to live in and wouldn’t want to raise a family in.

We need to do a renovation project on an imposing old structure that has fallen into disrepair. But we don’t want to restore to its original condition. We want to make it better. Buildings in the eighteenth century had no indoor plumbing or A/C. So we want to restore what worked over the centuries and add what we have learned in the process. We can build a better future. It is up to us.

If we have incentives that motivate us to do the right things, and we have the tools necessary to accomplish our goals and if we have the individual and societal discipline to work toward those goals we can build that better future we all hope for.