Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  I would argue the same thing happened to the Republican Party in America. The G.O.P. used to be an incredibly rich polyculture. It gave us ideas as diverse as our national parks (under Theodore Roosevelt), the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (under Richard Nixon), radical nuclear arms control and the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole (under Ronald Reagan), cap-and-trade to curb acid rain (under George H. W. Bush), and market-based health care reform (under Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts). And for decades the party itself was a pluralistic amalgam of northern liberal Republicans and southern and western conservatives. But in recent years the Tea Party and other hyperconservative forces, also funded in large part by fossil fuel companies and oil billionaires, have tried to wipe out the Republican Party’s once rich polyculture and turn it into a monoculture that’s enormously susceptible to diseased ideas: climate change is a hoax; evolution never happened; we don’t need immigration reform. All of this weakened the G.O.P.’s foundation and opened the way for an invasive species such as Donald Trump to make deep inroads into its garden.

  A 2012 study by the Kauffman Foundation revealed that immigrants founded one-quarter of U.S. technology start-up companies. The study, entitled “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now,” shows that “24.3 percent of engineering and technology start-up companies have at least one immigrant founder serving in a key role,” Reuters reported on October 2, 2012. “The study paid particular attention to Silicon Valley, where it analyzed 335 engineering and technology start-ups. It found 43.9 percent were founded by at least one immigrant. ‘High-skilled immigrants will remain a critical asset for maintaining U.S. competitiveness in the global economy,’ wrote the authors of the study.”

  It is not true just for America. As George Yeo, the veteran Singaporean cabinet minister, told a conference of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in October 2014, Singapore’s “ability to work in dense networks and be able to connect to different cultural domains, and to turn it into our own economic advantage,” is its secret sauce. “Ultimately, what drives Singapore, what gives Singapore our special advantage, is the ability to arbitrage across cultures.”

  Ownership Cultures

  There is no perfect human analog to the way nature unconsciously evolves a sense of belonging in ecosystems, but there is a rough parallel—and that is promoting a culture of ownership in human societies, which always creates more resilience.

  “Ownership is the one thing that fixes more things so other things can be made easier to fix,” argues the education expert Stefanie Sanford of the College Board. More often than not, she says, when citizens feel a sense of ownership over their country, when teachers feel a sense of ownership over their classrooms, when students feel a sense of ownership over their education, more good things tend to happen than bad. You get outcomes that are much more internally generated and therefore self-sustaining. And where ownership doesn’t exist, where people feel like renters or transients, more bad things tend to happen.

  When someone assumes ownership, it is difficult to ask more of them than they ask of themselves. In education, “there is nothing I can do for you if you don’t own it yourself first,” argues Sanford. Andreas Schleicher, who runs the Programme for International Student Assessment exams, a global evaluation of scholastic performance, observed that those scoring highest are Asian countries that have “ownership cultures—a high degree of professional autonomy for teachers … where teachers get to participate in shaping standards and curriculum and have ample time for continuous professional development.” They are not disengaged from the tools of their own craft, like a chef whose only job is to reheat someone else’s cooking.

  When you are an owner, you care, you pay attention, you build stewardship, and you think about the future. If you build a house for a quick flip, how strong will you build its foundation? People always tend to cut corners in a place where they won’t actually be living. And that is why I have so often over the years quoted the dictum “In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.” Ownership focuses you on long-term thinking over short-term, and on strategy over tactics.

  I have spent a lot of time, in America and abroad, covering the struggles of different groups to assert ownership over their societies and the consequences of their lack of it. And I am forever struck at how quickly ownership can change behaviors and enable adaptation, self-propulsion, resilience, and healthy interdependencies.

  In February 2011 I was in Cairo’s Tahrir Square for the climactic toppling of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. The uprising in Tahrir Square was all about the self-empowerment of a long-repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer willing to be deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be humiliated by their own leaders, who told them for thirty years that they were not ready for democracy. Indeed, the Egyptian democracy movement was everything that Hosni Mubarak said it was not: homegrown, indefatigable, and authentically Egyptian. On February 9, I spent part of the morning in the square watching and photographing a group of young Egyptian students wearing plastic gloves taking garbage in both hands and neatly scooping it into black plastic bags to keep the area clean. For centuries Arabs have just been renting their countries from kings, dictators, and colonial powers. So they had no desire to wash them. Now they did. Nearby hung a sign that said: “Tahrir—the only free place in Egypt.” So I went up to one of these young kids on garbage duty—Karim Turki, twenty-three, who worked in a skin-care shop—and asked him for my column: “Why did you volunteer for this?” He couldn’t get the words out in broken English fast enough: “This is my earth. This is my country. This is my home. I will clean all Egypt when Mubarak will go out.”

  Three years later, in April 2014, I found myself in Kiev’s Independence Square, known in Ukrainian as the Maidan, shortly after the uprising there against the country’s corrupt leadership. The barricades of piled cobblestones, tires, wood beams, and burned cars erected by Ukrainian revolutionaries were still there. The whole scene looked like a Broadway set of Les Misérables. People were still laying fresh flowers at the makeshift shrines for the more than one hundred people killed there. My local guide explained to me that in winter, when the revolution broke out, the square and its sidewalks were usually covered with a layer of ice that the city never managed to effectively clear. But after the protesters took the square, elderly women came with little picks and shovels, chopped the ice, and kept it clean. They did it themselves. They did it for free—exactly like those young students in Tahrir Square.

  Ownership is also self-propulsive, which makes it an important ingredient for resilience. In February 2015, I was invited to speak at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. I stayed over on the campus and the morning after my talk I was given a tour by LCDR Brooke Millard, who taught writing there but had previously commanded a coast guard cutter. Since she was considerably shorter than me, I couldn’t help but ask her how she managed to command all those male crewmen, which—rank or no rank, formal authority or no formal authority—could not have been easy out there on the blue ocean. She thought about it for a couple of days and then wrote me this e-mail, which is as good a description of leading by extending ownership as I could find:

  Thanks for asking. At the unit I worked at previous to my command tour, I was in charge of about 10 chiefs—guys with about 18+ years, all subject matter experts in their specialty field. I was a brand new LT with four years in [and] 26 years old. When I told them to jump, I was expecting a “how high?” response, but instead I got [a very hostile] attitude. The first 6 months there were tough. I had to come up with a different leadership technique. I knew that children are often given two choices for food: “Do you want carrots or apples for a snack?”—both options of which mom approves of, but giving a child the option gives him/her a choice and [makes] them learn to own that decision. I tried a similar technique with my chiefs. I introduced a problem/issue, solicited th
eir advice/ideas, and ultimately came up with two options for action; one was usually a better option than the other, and they naturally chose the option I liked best. But it appeared—to them, at least—that they had a choice—and, therefore, buy-in. It worked at the training command, so I applied the same technique with many decisions as a captain of a ship. At 29 years old, I led a crew of 17 men—and at least five of them were older than me. I think getting my command cadre’s buy-in for major decisions helped—it helped them feel empowered and listened to, and it also helped me to weigh options and get the support I needed to carry out the decisions.

  Millard shared ownership of both her ship’s problems and its solutions and thereby leveraged the full energies of her crew, making the whole ship more resilient. As the Mumbai-based McKinsey management consultant Alok Kshirsagar once remarked to me, if you want to solve a big problem, “you need to go from taking credit to sharing credit to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit.” Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership, and the by-product is both resilience and propulsion.

  Getting Federalism Right

  In both nature and politics it is very important to get the balance right between individual ecosystems and the larger whole, so each can nurture the other. There is no hard-and-fast rule for doing this, but resilience comes from having the right balance at the right time. In American politics today, in the age of accelerations, the balance between the federal, state, and local levels needs rebalancing, noted Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

  For much of the twentieth century, he said, the “arrow of history pointed to the centralization of political power and the nationalization of policy solutions” for addressing the big problems of the day. The primary tools of politics at that time were seen as “the emerging national bureaucracy and the administrative state,” Marshall explained. That was quite logical in early twentieth-century America, “since state and local governments needed the weight of the national government to deal with new, monopolistic economic actors who could buy legislatures and overwhelm the puny power of states,” let alone localities. And then came the Great Depression and its aftermath.

  The New Deal, added Marshall, “expanded the scope of federal power dramatically, by launching huge public works and relief programs; regulating prices and wages; nationalizing income support and labor protections; establishing Social Security; and multiplying federal agencies staffed by a new breed of college-educated technocrats. Washington also replaced laissez-faire with Keynesian spending designed to manage the business cycle.” And that nationalizing impulse intensified after World War II, he noted, “reaching its peak in LBJ’s Great Society. This period of expansive liberalism saw the federal government assume responsibility for problems that had previously been left mainly to states and local authorities: racial injustice, poverty, illness, gender inequality, urban decay, educational inequity and pollution.” Geopolitics also pushed things up to Washington, D.C., which had to finance and sustain a global Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. Plus, you had the need for real expertise from the federal government for solving new, complex industrial-age problems.

  This was the broad and defining trend of American politics in the twentieth century that shaped many of the key planks of the “left” and “right” political agendas we know today—with the conservative right tending to be more sympathetic to the interests of owners and capital, always looking for more market-based solutions and less federal government regulation, and the liberal left tending toward more government-led solutions that promoted not just equal opportunities but equal outcomes, particularly for minorities and the poor.

  The fact is, however, that the age of accelerations poses a different set of challenges and opportunities than the industrial age, and it requires a different balance between the center and periphery, the federal and the local. Today we need to reverse the centralization of power that we’ve seen over the past century in favor of decentralization. The national government has grown so big bureaucratically that it is way too slow to keep up with the change in the pace of change. Meanwhile, states and many localities have grown more flexible and capable—living on the edge of the iceberg, they feel every change in temperature and wind first; they need to react quickly, and now they can.

  Many businesses are now global and quite dynamic; many cities now sponsor their own international trade missions and create their own consortiums of local businesses, educators, and philanthropies to upgrade their workforces. And thanks to local think tanks and universities participating in public policy, there is plenty of localized expertise available. Very often I meet mayors who have a much better grasp of the world, and the requirements for competitiveness, than their congressmen. Meanwhile, the federal government is in no position to supplement the fiscal deficiencies of states and cities alike, and it won’t be for at least a generation, until the baby boomers die off; so localities will have to figure out for themselves how to generate the growth and incomes to sustain their own pension obligations.

  This doesn’t mean we can get along without a federal government. Hardly. We still need it to manage the national economy, national security, national health care, taxation, and social safety nets. “But we live in a different world,” said Marshall. “Power today flows out of Washington. Urban America—centers of economic and social dysfunction a generation ago—have now become the nation’s laboratories for public innovation.”

  Therefore the real question, argues Marshall, is “How can the states and the federal government become better partners with local leaders?” The short answer is: wherever possible, the thrust of federal government should shift from offering solutions driven by the national bureaucracy to incentivizing, enabling, and inspiring experimentation and innovation from the local and individual level upward.

  We will look at this issue more closely in the next two chapters, but for now suffice it to say that national and state leadership should be about enabling the compounding acceleration of local start-ups in both the economic sector and the social sector to build resilient and prospering citizens who have the skills and institutional support to keep pace with the age of accelerations.

  Mother Nature’s Political Party

  And that leads to the last of Mother Nature’s killer apps that we need to consciously translate into politics in the age of accelerations. We need an entrepreneurial mind-set, a willingness to approach politics and problem-solving with an utterly hybrid, heterodox, and nondogmatic mixing and matching of ideas, without regard to traditional left-right catechisms—letting all kinds of ideas coevolve, just as plants and animals coevolve in nature.

  Unfortunately, as noted above, that is not the mind-set of our two parties in America today. For now their mind-set is to double down on their old ideas—tax cuts, deregulation, and opposition to immigration for Republicans; and more social welfare, more support for teachers’ unions, more regulation, more identity politics, and more redistribution from a very slow-growing pie for Democrats. For reasons of identity and fund-raising these two parties cannot let ideas that are best paired together actually be paired together; and for legacy reasons they cannot take out that blank sheet of white paper and think wholly anew about innovating around the great accelerations. We can do better—and not by splitting the difference between the two parties we have, but by rising above both and going beyond both, until they crack up and reconstitute themselves entirely around the challenges of facing three climate changes at once, and using Mother Nature as a mentor.

  If Mother Nature had a political party—let’s call it the “Making the Future Work for Everybody” party—here are some of the policies I think would be part of her platform. Mother Nature has no problem being to the left of the left and to the right of the right at the same time. Whatever should coevolve must coevolve. Here’s what I mean:

  1. She would favor a single-payer universal health care system funded by a progressiv
e value-added consumption tax (except on groceries and other necessities). The level of this tax would be annually adjusted to the cost of health care, so citizens could feel the connection between the cost of health care and the VAT they pay at the store. If a single-payer system can work for Canada, Australia, and Sweden and provide generally better health outcomes at lower prices, it can work for us, and it would get U.S. companies out of the health care business and Medicare out of payroll taxes.

  2. She would extend and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit, which are essential trampolines to bounce people out of poverty, by topping up wages of low-income workers and thereby providing an incentive to work. (Both are set to expire in 2017.) Explaining how the credits work, the group Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice noted, “For a couple with two children, the [EITC] credit rate is 40% of the first $13,090 in earnings, with a maximum credit of $5,236 if earnings reach $22,300. Over that amount the credit rate drops substantially until it reaches zero for taxpayers over $47,162 … The Child Tax Credit allows a nonrefundable credit against income taxes of $1,000 per qualifying child under age 17.” Trampolines that incentivize work—and the dignity, discipline, and learning that come from work—are the best mechanisms for sustainably lifting families out of poverty. Some recent research also suggests that topping up the wages of low-income working parents through the EITC results in more lasting benefits for their kids—in terms of school success and college enrollment—than family support programs like prekindergarten or Head Start.

  3. She would pair support for free trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with the United States and eleven Pacific Rim countries and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union—with wage insurance for workers impacted by free trade. Economic research has now proved that the surge of imports into America after China was invited to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 hammered a specific set of American workers, while benefiting a much wider public with cheaper imported goods. Rather than close off trade with China or any other country, we need to expand trade, which benefits the economy as a whole, while finally getting serious about protecting those among us who specifically have been harmed by trade. David Autor, an economist at MIT, co-wrote the widely discussed February 2016 study “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” which details the very real job-destroying impact of Chinese imports on certain American communities. He told The Washington Post on May 12, 2016, that it is quite possible for the overall American pie “to grow by 3 percent, and some slices to contract by 40 percent, and we’ve seen that. We still have lots of displaced people, lots of angry people.”