Re: FW - No Future
-- Hi all, I thank Arthur Cordell for pleading my case far better than I ever could. .. dennis Dennis Paul wrote: It was the Reagan revolution that has revoked these laws and sent us on our present path downwards towards another social restructuring. I find this quote evocative and I would like Dennis to elaborate. In Canada, specifically in Ontario and Alberta, two of our richest provinces, the governments have embarked on major - I mean major neo-con initiatives in restructuring Medicare, education, labour laws, welfare reform and I see in the paper today, that Ontario is about to debate the possibility of opening up Crown lands to mining companies and increased logging and pulp and paper. This is happening 10 years after the American experience which is the typical time lag between the two countries. Social Restructuring has to have an outcome. The outcome put forward is a balanced budget, efficiency, ( to the degree that they count the steps a postman makes on a walk and then devise walks to maximize each individual effort) lower taxes, shrink the size of government and increase the power of government in the hands of the ruling party. All thoughts of equality are subverted to the concept of equal opportunity rather than need. The future is left to take care of itself, child poverty which leads to increased crime and lower standards of social adjustment are accepted under the guise of the elite's ability to rise to the top and be damned to any who are not elite. Global warning is balanced against the need for business to keep growing rather than a world wide crisis that all should participate in solving. It is hard not to be cynical in these times as the power seems to reside in the hands of a small minority that blatantly lobbies and advertises for their self interest rather than others interest. Well enough of my Sunday morning ruminations. I think some of the comments Eva made are very valid. Respectfully Thomas Lunde
[isg] Contribution from Harlan Cleveland #1 (fwd)
And here is some background on Harlan Cleveland. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 20:52:07 -0800 From: Brooks Jordan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [isg] Contribution from Harlan Cleveland #1 Dear Participants, We would like to begin our inquiry this week by sharing with you some thoughts about information from Harlan Cleveland, President of the World Academy of Art and Science. With Harlan's guidance, we have chosen two sections from his booklet "Leadership and the Information Revolution" (1997). In the first, he discusses the special properties of information. In the second, he poses some major questions of our time that these information properties might help us find new answers to. We have sent the sections as a separate message. Harlan wrote "Leadership and the Information Revolution" based on a series of talks he gave at the United Nations University's commencement of its new International Leadership Academy, hosted by the Government of Jordan in Amman. A special thank you to Harlan for helping us broaden and deepen our conversation on the Information Society and Governance. Please take a few moments to read about Harlan Cleveland and The World Academy of Art and Science. About Harlan Cleveland Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, is President of the World Academy of Art and Science. A Princeton University graduate in 1938, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in the late 1930's; an economic warfare specialist (in Washington, DC) and United Nations relief and rehabilitation administrator (in Italy and China) in the 1940's. In 1948 he joined the Economic Cooperation Administration, where he served as Director of the China Aid Program, then developed and managed U.S. aid to eight East Asian countries, and later became (as Assistant Director for Europe of the Mutual Security Agency) the Washington based supervisor of the Marshall Plan for European recovery in its fourth year, 1952. In early 1953 he left Washington to become executive editor, and later also publisher, of "The Reporter" magazine. In 1956 he was appointed dean of the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He was a delegate from the State of New York to the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. During the 1960's Harlan Cleveland served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in the administration of President John F. Kennedy, and in 1965 was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as U.S. Ambassador to NATO, serving in that post also under President Richard Nixon until May 1969. From 1969 to 1974 he was President of the University of Hawaii, of which he is now President Emeritus. From 1974 to 1980 he developed and directed the Program in International Affairs of the Aspen Institute, with headquarters both in Princeton, New Jersey, and in Aspen, Colorado. During 1977-78 he was also chairman of the U.S. Weather Modification Advisory Board. In 1979 he served for one semester as the Distinguished Visiting Tom Slick Professor of World Peace at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin. During the 1980's, he served as the founding dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, a graduate school, research institute, and one of the nation's early centers for leadership education. He concurrently served two three-year terms as Trustee-at-Large of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He retired in 1988 as Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, where he still has an office in the Humphrey Center. Professor Cleveland has been a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science since 1977, and in 1991 became its president, a position he still holds. In 1994 he hosted in Minneapolis, preceded by four international workshops, a major gathering of the World Academy Fellows on "The Governance of Diversity." Also in 1994, he was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of VITA (Volunteers in Technical Assistance), while it was planning the first operational low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite designed to serve the two-thirds of the world's population still "beyond the last telephone pole." He is now Honorary Chairman of VITA. Harlan Cleveland has authored hundreds of magazine and journal articles, and eleven books, mostly on executive leadership and world affairs. The latest is "Birth of a New World: An Open Moment for International Leadership (1993). Other recent books include "The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society" (1985, republished in paperback 1989), and "The Global Commons: Policy for the Planet (1990). From 1987 to 1993 he wrote a fortnightly column on world affairs for the "Star Tribune," Newspaper of the Twin Cities. About The World Academy of Art and Science The World Academy of Art and Science was established in 1960
[isg] Contribution from Harlan Cleveland #2 (fwd)
I am forwarding a post from another list that seems relevant to futurework. arthur cordell -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 20:52:47 -0800 From: Brooks Jordan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [isg] Contribution from Harlan Cleveland #2 The following is excerpts from Harlan Cleveland's "Leadership and the Information Revolution." Section 1 is from pgs 15-16 and Section 2 from pgs 8-9. Section 1 In my opening comment last Sunday, I suggested that information will be playing the prima donna role in economic history that physical labor, stone, bronze, land, minerals, metals, and energy once played -- and that this would require us "to revise all sorts of assumptions we have treated as 'solid' [because they had to do with things] but now turn out to be fragile and flawed." The trouble seems to be that we have carried over into our thinking about information (which is to say symbols) concepts developed for the management of things -- concepts such as property, depletion, depreciation, monopoly, market economies, class struggle, and top-down leadership. The same is true of much of our inherited thinking about privilege, discrimination, equity, and fairness. This is, I know, a pretty comprehensive list of crumbling concepts, but I mean quite literally what I'm saying. For a start, it helps to stop treating information as just another thing, a sort of commodity with pseudophysical properties, and look hard instead at what makes it so special. For information, the product of human brainwork, is fundamentally different from all its predecessors as civilization's dominant resource. 1. Unlike tangible resources, information expands as it's used. Information tends toward glut, not scarcity. Our common complaint about information is not skimpy rations but overload. 2. Information, as it expands, is less hungry for other resources than were the earlier engines of economic growth. By and large, the higher the tech, the less wasteful of energy and physical raw materials. Computers, for example, get smaller, more powerful, and use less electricity all at the same time. A friend in the aluminum industry has charts and calculations to show that "the smarter the metal, the less it weighs." Not "the limits to growth," but something more like "the growth of limits," is the essence of modern economic history. 3. Information is substitutable. It can and increasingly does replace land, labor, and capital. Information workers, using computers hooked up to worldwide telecommunications, don't need much real estate to do their work. Robotics, automation, and computer/communication office systems displace not only factory and agricultural workers but whole levels of middle-management work as well. Any machine that can be put to your use by computerized communication doesn't have to be in your own inventory. 4. Information is readily transportable at, almost, the speed of light-and evidently, by telepathy or prayer, much faster than that. Hence the passing of "remoteness," which becomes more a matter of personal choice than geography. 5. Information is porous, transparent. It leaks; it has an inherent tendency to leak. The more it leaks, the more we have, and the more of us have it. The straitjackets of government "classification," trade secrecy, intellectual property rights, and confidentiality of all kinds fit very loosely on this restless resource. 6. Information is shared, not exchanged. It may look like an exchange transaction when someone buys a book, a magazine, a software program, a symbolic artifact, or permission to access a database. But what is being bought or sold is the delivery mechanism; any message delivered is also retained by the seller, who shares it with the buyer. Section 2 These six simple, pregnant propositions, multiplied and spread around the world and down the generations, are bound to provide new answers to some of the biggest "why" questions about the exciting times just ahead of us. For example: · Why, in our communities, our nations, and our world, nobody can possibly be in general charge -- of anything. · Why diversity, more and more, will be the law of life and of leadership on this planet. · Why people will just have to find ways to be different, yet together -- not only in Bosnia and the Middle East, but also in Washington and Tokyo and New Delhi and Rio and Berlin and thousands of other mixed up places. · Why we'll have to change our ways of thinking about work -- and probably even chop away the linkage between "working" and "making a living." · Why the rapid globalization of ideas and markets will require new policies and international agreements for governance and business, for art and science, for culture and communication. · Why, since information can't really be "owned" (only its delivery system can), the phrase
Re: Millennium End/Beginning
At 01:58 PM 11/17/97 -0500, AR Gouin wrote: It's even appeared in publications of the World Future Society, of which I'm letting my membership laps after (being fooled for so many years into) thinking them capable of seeing the difference between past and future :-(. I'll second that! I am letting my membership lapse too. We really need a futurist organization, but the World Future Society is hopeless. Jay -- http://dieoff.org
Re: Millennium End/Beginning
Well, I don't recommend dropping out of the World Future Society, but I suggest you consider joining the World Futures Studies Federation. On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Jay Hanson wrote: At 01:58 PM 11/17/97 -0500, AR Gouin wrote: It's even appeared in publications of the World Future Society, of which I'm letting my membership laps after (being fooled for so many years into) thinking them capable of seeing the difference between past and future :-(. I'll second that! I am letting my membership lapse too. We really need a futurist organization, but the World Future Society is hopeless. Jay -- http://dieoff.org
