The Age of Transitions - Newt Gingrich 2000

www.newt.org
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. We are already experiencing the dramatic changes brought on by computers, com
munications, and the Internet. The combination of science and technology with en
trepreneurs and venture capitalists has created a momentum of change which is ex
traordinary. Yet these changes will be overshadowed in the next twenty years by
an emerging even bigger set of changes based on a combination of biology, inform
ation and nanoscience (the science of objects at a billionth of a meter, from on
e to four hundred atoms in size). This new and as yet unappreciated wave of chan
ge will combine with the already remarkable pattern of change brought on by comp
uters, communication and the Internet to create a continuing series of new break
throughs with new goods and services. We will be constantly in transition as eac
h new idea is succeeded by an even better one. This will be an Age of Transition
s and it will last for at least a half-century.
2. In the age of transitions, the way we acquire goods and services are rapidly
evolving in the private sector and in our personal lives. Government and bureauc
racy are changing at a dramatically slower rate and the gap between the potentia
l goods and services, productivity, efficiencies and conveniences being created,
and the traditional behaviors of government and bureaucracies are getting wider
.
3. The language of politics and government is increasingly isolated from the lan
guage of everyday life. Political elites increasingly speak a language that is a
separate dialect from the words people use to describe their daily lives and th
eir daily concerns. The result in part is that the American people increasingly
tune out politics.
4. Eventually a political movement will develop a program of change for governme
nt, which will provide greater goods and services at lower and lower costs. When
that movement can explain its new solutions in the language of everyday life it
will gain a decisive majority as people opt for better lives through better sol
utions by bringing government into conformity with the entrepreneurial systems t
hey are experiencing in the private sector.
5. Understanding the Age of Transitions, applying its principles to create bette
r solutions for delivery of government goods and services, and developing and co
mmunicating a program in the language of everyday life - so people hear it and b
elieve it despite the clutter and distractions of the traditional language of po
litics and government - is a very complex process and requires thought and plann
ing.
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Newt Gingrich
www.newt.org
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Introduction
We are living through two tremendous patterns of scientific-technological change
. Each would be powerful in itself. Combined, the two patterns guarantee that we
will be in constant transitions as one breakthrough or innovation follows anoth
er.
Those who study, understand and invest in these patterns will live dramatically
better than those who ignore them. Nations that focus their systems of learning,
health, economic growth and national security on these changes will have health
ier, more knowledgeable people in more productive jobs creating greater wealth a
nd prosperity and living in greater safety through more modern, more powerful in
telligence and defense capabilities.
Those countries that ignore these patterns of change will fall further behind an
d find themselves weaker, poorer, and more vulnerable than their wiser, more cha
nge oriented neighbors.
The United States will have to continue to invest in new science and to adopt ou
r systems of health, learning and national security to these patterns of change
if we want to continue to lead the world in prosperity, quality of life and mili
tary-intelligence capabilities.
At a minimum we need to double the federal research budget at all levels, reform
science and math learning decisively and modernize our system of health and lea
rning and government administration.
Periods of transition are periods of dramatic cost crashes. We should be able to
use the new patterns of change to produce greater health and greater learning a
t lower cost. Government administration can be more effective at lower cost. Our
national security will experience similar crashes in cost.
This combination of better outcomes at lower cost will not be produced by libera
l or conservative ideology. It will be produced by the systematic study of the n
ew patterns and the use of new innovations and new technologies to produce bette
r results more cheaply.
The Communications and Computer Revolution
The revolution that has been dubbed the Information Age began around 1965. The e
arliest recognitions of this vast change were Kenneth Boulding's The Meaning of
the Twentieth Century (1964), Peter Drucker's The Age of Discontinuities (1969),
Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Future Shock (1970), and their far more useful and an
alytical The Third Wave (1980). These commentators all understood that the indus
trial era was being replaced by some new, profound change. As Drucker's title, T
he Age of Discontinuities indicates, they were not sure what would come out the
other end but they were sure it would not simply be a more powerful industrial e
ra.
Computing is a key element in this revolution. The numbers are stunning. Accordi
ng to Professor James Meindl, the chairman of the Georgia Tech Microelectronics
Department, the first computer built with a transistor was "Tradic" in 1955, and
it had only 800 transistors. The Pentium II chip has 7,500,000 transistors. In
the next year or so an experimental chip will be built with one billion transist
ors. Within fifteen to twenty years there will be a chip with one trillion trans
istors. However you graph that scale of change, it is enormous and its implicati
ons are huge. It is fair to estimate that we are only one-fifth of the way into
developing the computer revolution.
Yet focusing only on computer power understates the scale of change. Communicati
ons capabilities are going to continue to expand dramatically and that may have
as big an impact as computing power. Today most homes get Internet access at 28,
000 to 56,000 bits per second. Within a few years a combination of new technolog
ies for compressing information (allowing you to get more done in a given capaci
ty) with bigger capacity (fiber optic and cable) and entirely new approaches (su
ch as satellite direct broadcast for the Internet) may move household access up
to at least six million bits per second, and some believe we may reach the 110 m
illion bits needed for uncompressed motion pictures. Combined with the developme
nt of high definition television and virtual systems, an amazing range of opport
unities will open up. This may be expanded even further by the continuing develo
pment of the cell phone into a universal utility with voice, Internet, credit ca
rd, and television applications all in one portable handheld phone.
The S curve of Technological Change
The communications and computer revolution and the earlier industrial revolution
are both examples of the concept of an "S" curve. The s curve depicts the evolu
tion of technological change. Science and technology begin to accelerate slowly
and then knowledge and experience accumulates they grow much more rapidly. Final
ly, once the field has matured the rate of change levels off. The resulting patt
ern look like an S.
The S Curve
These large "S" curves are made up of thousands of smaller breakthroughs that cr
eate many small "S" curves of technological growth.
The two "S" curves of the Age of Transitions
We are starting to live through two patterns of change. The first is the enormou
s computer and communications revolution described above. We are at most only on
e-fifth of the way through it. The second, only now beginning to rise, is the co
mbination of the nano world, biology, and information. These two "s" curves will
overlap. It is the overlapping period we are just beginning to enter and it is
that period which I believe will be an Age of Transitions.

The Age of Transitions

The Nano World, biology, and information as the next wave of change
Focusing on computers and communications is only the first step toward understan
ding the Age of Transitions. While we are still in the early stages of the compu
ter-communications pattern of change, we are already beginning to see a new, eve
n more powerful pattern of change that will be built on a synergistic interactio
n between three different areas: the nano world, biology, and information.
The nano world may be the most powerful new areas of understanding. "Nano" is th
e space between one atom and about 400 atoms. It is the space in which quantum b
ehavior begins to replace the Newtonian physics you and I are used to. The world
"nano" means one-billionth and is usually used in reference to a nanosecond (on
e billionth of a second) or a nanometer (one billionth of a meter). In this worl
d of atoms and molecules, new tools and new techniques are enabling scientists t
o create entirely new approaches to manufacturing and to health. Nanotechnology
"grows" materials by adding the right atoms and molecules. Nanotechnology is pro
bably twenty years away but it may be at least as powerful as space or computing
in its implications for new tools and new capabilities.
The nano world also includes a series of material technology breakthroughs that
will continue to change how we build things, how much they weigh, and how much s
tress and punishment they can take. For example, it may be possible to grow carb
on storage tubes so small that hydrogen could be safely stored without refrigera
tion, thus enabling the creation of a hydrogen fuel cell technology with dramati
c implications for the economy and the environment. These new materials may make
possible a one-hour flight from New York to Tokyo, an ultra lightweight car, an
d a host of other possibilities. Imagine a carbon tube 100 times as strong as st
eel and only 46th as heavy. It has already been grown in the NASA Ames Laborator
y. This approach to manufacturing will save energy, conserve our raw materials,
eliminate waste products and produce a dramatically healthier environment. The i
mplications for the advancement of environmentalism and the irrelevancy of oil p
rices alone are impressive.
The nano world makes possible the ability to grow molecular helpers (not really
tools because they may be organic and be grown rather than built (what?) We may
be able to develop anti-cancer molecules that penetrate your cells without damag
e and hunt cancer at its earliest development. Imagine drinking with your normal
orange juice 3,000,000 molecular rotor rooters to clean out your arteries witho
ut an operation.
The nano world opens up our understanding of biology and biology teaches us abou
t the nano world because virtually all biological activities are at a molecular
level. Thus our growing capabilities in nano tools will expand dramatically our
understanding of biology. Our growing knowledge about molecular biology will exp
and our understanding of the nano world.
Beyond the implications of the nano world for biology, in the next decade the Hu
man Genome project will teach us more about humans than our total knowledge to t
his point. The development of new technologies (largely a function of physics an
d mathematics) will increase our understanding of the human brain in ways previo
usly unimaginable. From Alzheimer's to Parkinson's to Schizophrenia, there will
be virtually no aspect of our understanding of the human brain and human nervous
system which can not be transformed in the next two decades.
We are on the verge of creating intelligent synthetic environments that will rev
olutionize both how the medical institutions educate and plan. It will be possib
le to practice a complicated, dangerous operation many times in a synthetic worl
d with feel, smell, appearance and sound, all precisely the same as the real ope
ration. The flight and combat simulators of today are stunningly better than the
sand tables and paper targets of forty years ago. An intelligent, synthetic env
ironment will be an even bigger breakthrough from our current capabilities. Desi
gning a building or an organization will be possible in the synthetic world befo
re you decide to do it for real. The opportunities for education will be unendin
g.
Finally, the information revolution (computers and communications) will give us
vastly better capabilities to deal with the nano world and with biology.
It is the synergistic effect of these three systems together (the nano world, ti
mes biology, times information) that will lead to an explosion of new knowledge
and new capabilities and create an intersecting s curve. We will simultaneously
be experiencing the computer/communications revolution and the nano world/biolog
y/information revolution. These two curves create an age of transitions.
This rest of this paper attempts to outline the scale of change being brought ab
out by the age of transitions, the principles that underlie those changes, and h
ow to apply those principles in a strategic process that could lead to a governi
ng majority.
Politics and Government in the Age of Transitions
In the foreseeable future we will be inundated with new inventions, new discover
ies, new startups, and new entrepreneurs. These will create new goods and servic
es. The e-customer will become the e-patient and the e-voter. As expectations ch
ange, the process of politics and government will change.
People's lives will be more complex and inevitably overwhelming. Keeping up with
the changes which affect them and their loved ones exhausts most people. They f
ocus most of their time and energy on the tasks of everyday life. When they achi
eve success in their daily tasks they turn to the new goods and services, the ne
w job and investment opportunities, and the new ideas inherent in the entreprene
urial creativity of the age of transitions. No individual and no country will fu
lly understand all the changes as they occur, or will be able to adapt to them f
lawlessly during this time. On the other hand, there will be a large premium pla
ced on individuals, companies and countries that are able to learn and adjust mo
re rapidly.
Reality and the Language of
Politics and Government
Reality and Language of
Everyday Life
The Developments,
Ideas and Realities of
The Age of Transitions
The political party or movement that can combine these three zones into one nati
onal dialogue will have an enormous advantage, both in offering better goods and
services, and in attracting the support of most Americans.
The new products and services created by the Age of Transitions are creating vas
t opportunities for improving everyday life. The government has an opportunity t
o use these new principles to develop far more effective and appropriate governm
ent services. Politicians have the chance to explain these opportunities in a la
nguage most citizens can understand, and to offer a better future, with greater
quality of life, by absorbing the Age of Transitions into government and politic
s.
The average citizen needs to have political leadership that understands the scal
e of change we are undergoing, and which has the ability to offer some effective
guidance about how to reorganize daily life - which simultaneously has the abil
ity to reorganize the government that affects so much of our daily life. Inevita
bly, the Age of Transitions will overwhelm and exhaust people. Only after they h
ave dealt with their own lives do they turn to the world of politics and governm
ent.
When we do look at politics we are discouraged, and in some cases repulsed, by t
he conflict-oriented political environment, the nitpicking, cynical nature of th
e commentaries, and the micromanaged, overly detailed style of political-insider
coverage. The more Americans focus on the common sense and the cooperative effo
rt required for their own lives, and the more they focus on the excitement and t
he wealth-creating and opportunity-creating nature of the entrepreneurial world,
the more they reject politics and government as an area of useful interest.
Not only do politics and government seem more destructive and conflict oriented,
but the language of politics seems increasingly archaic and the ideas seem incr
easingly trivial or irrelevant. People who live their lives with the speed, accu
racy and convenience of automatic teller machines (ATM's) giving them cash at an
y time in any city, cell phones that work easily virtually everywhere, the ease
of shopping on the web and staying in touch through email find the bureaucratic,
interest group and arcane nature of political dialogue and government policy to
be painfully outmoded. Politicians' efforts to popularize the obsolete are seen
as increasingly irrelevant and therefore ignored.
This phenomenon helps explain the January 2000 poll in which 81% of Americans sa
id they had not read about the Presidential campaign in the last 24 hours, 89% s
aid they had not thought about a presidential candidate in the same period, and
74% said they did not have a candidate for President (up 10% from last November)
.
The average voters' sense of distance from politics is felt even more strongly b
y the entrepreneurial and scientific groups who are inventing the future. They f
ind the difference between their intensely concentrated, creative and positive f
ocus of energy and the negative, bickering nature of politics especially alienat
ing, so they focus on their own creativity and generally stay aloof from politic
s unless a specific interest is threatened or a specific issue arouses their int
erest.
Projects that focus on voter participation miss the nature of a deliberate avoid
ance by voters of politics. In some ways this is a reversion to an American norm
prior to the great depression and the Second World War. For most of American hi
story people focused their energies on their own lives and their immediate commu
nities. The national government (and often even the state government) seemed dis
tant and irrelevant.
This was the world of very limited government desired by Jefferson and described
by Tocqueville's Democracy in America. With the exception of the Civil War, thi
s was the operating model from 1776 until 1930. Then the depression led to the r
ise of big government, the Second World War led to even bigger government, and t
he Cold War sustained a focus on Washington. When there was a real danger of nuc
lear war and the continuing crisis threatened the survival of freedom, it was na
tural for the President to be the central figure in America and for attention to
focus on Washington.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a gradual slow shift of pow
er and attention out of Washington and back to the state and local communities.
There has been a steady decline in popular attention paid to national politics.
Those who complain about this pattern and who seek higher turnout and greater pu
blic participation misunderstand the mechanisms and patterns that are at work.
Projects that focus on voter participation often miss the nature of this deliber
ate avoidance of politics. When Republicans designed a positive campaign of big
ideas in the 1994 Contract With America, some nine million additional voters tur
ned out (the largest off year one party increase in history). When Jesse Ventura
offered a real alternative (at least in style) in 1998 younger voters turned ou
t in record numbers.
The voter as a customer is telling the political-governmental system something p
rofound by his or her indifference. The political leadership class is simply fai
ling to produce a large enough set of solutions in a language that is worth the
time, attention, and focus of increasingly busy American citizens.
After a year of traveling around America (23 states) and spending time with entr
epreneurs, scientists and venture capitalists, I am increasingly convinced that
the American voters are right.
Let us imagine a world of 1870 in which the private sector had completed the tra
nscontinental railroad and the telegraph, but the political-governmental elites
had decided that they would operate by the rules of the pony express and the sta
gecoach. In private life and business life you could telegraph from Washington t
o San Francisco in a minute and could ship a cargo by rail in seven days. Howeve
r in political-governmental life you had to send written messages by pony expres
s that took two weeks and cargo by stagecoach that took two months. The growing
gap between the two capabilities would have driven you to despair about politics
and government as destructive, anachronistic systems.
Similarly, imagine that in 1900 a Washington Conference on Transportation Improv
ement had been created but the political-governmental elite had ruled that the o
nly topic would be the future of the horseshoe, and busied themselves with a bra
ss versus iron horseshoe debate. Henry Ford's efforts to create a mass produced
automobile would be ruled impractical and irrelevant. The Wright brothers' effor
t to create an airplane would be laughed at as an absurd fantasy. After all, nei
ther clearly stood on either the brass or the iron side of the debate. Yet which
would do more to change transportation over the next two decades: The political
-governmental power structure of Washington, or the unknown visionaries experime
nting without government grants and without recognition by the elites?
Consider just one example of this extraordinary and growing gap between the oppo
rtunities of the Age of Transitions and the reactionary nature of current govern
ment systems. The next time you use your ATM card consider that you are sending
a code over the net to approve taking cash out of your checking account. It can
be done on a 24/7 basis (24 hours a day, seven days a week) anywhere in the coun
try at your convenience.
Compare that speed, efficiency, security, and accuracy with the paper dominated,
fraud and waste ridden Health Care Financing Administration with its 133,000 pa
ges of regulations (more than the Internal Revenue Service). As a symbol of a ho
pelessly archaic model of bureaucracy there are few better examples than HCFA.
This growing gap between the realities and language of private life and the emer
ging realities of the Age of Transitions on the one hand and the increasingly ob
solete language and timid (horseshoe improvements) proposals of the political go
vernmental system convinces more and more voters to ignore politics and focus on
their own lives and on surviving the transitions.
This is precisely the pattern described by Norman Nie, et.al in the Changing Ame
rican Voter. They described a pool of latent voters who in the 1920s found nothi
ng in the political dialogue to interest them. These citizens simply stayed out
of the process as long as it stayed out of their lives. The depression did not m
obilize them. They sat out the 1932 election. Only when the New Deal policies of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt penetrated their lives did they become involved. In 1
936 Alf Landon, the Republican nominee, actually received a million more votes t
han Herbert Hoover had gotten in 1932. However FDR received seven million more v
otes than he had gotten in his first election. It was this massive increase in p
articipation that made the polls inaccurate and created the Democratic majority,
which in many ways survived until the 1994 election. The Republican victory of
1994 by drawing nine million additional voters over its 1990 results (the larges
t off year increase in American history) used bold promises in a positive campai
gn to engage people who had been turned off by politics.
There is a similar opportunity waiting for the first political party and politic
al leader to make sense out of the combination of daily life with the possibilit
ies being created by the Age of Transitions and develop both a language and a se
t of bold proposals which make sense to the average American in the context of t
heir own lives and experience.
This paper should be seen as the beginning of a process rather than as a set of
answers. Political-governmental leaders need to integrate the changes of the Age
of Transitions with the opportunities these changes create to improve people's
lives, develop the changes in government necessary to accelerate those improveme
nts, and explain the Age of Transitions era - and the policies it requires - in
the language of everyday life, so people will understand why it is worth their w
hile to be involved in politics and subsequently improve their own lives. Gettin
g this done will take a lot of people experimenting and attempting to meet the c
hallenge for a number of years. That is how the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians,
the early Republicans, the Progressives, the New Dealers and the Reagan conserva
tives succeeded. Each, over time, created a new understanding of America at an h
istoric moment. We aren't any smarter, and we won't get it done any faster. Howe
ver, the time to start is now and the way to start is to clearly understand the
scale of the opportunity and the principles that make it work.
Characteristics of an Age of Transitions
Thirty-six years after Boulding's first explanation of the coming change, and th
irty-one years after Drucker explained how to think about a discontinuity, some
key characteristics have emerged. This section outlines 18 characteristics and g
ives examples of how political and governmental leaders can help develop the app
ropriate policies for the age of transitions. However, it should first be noted
that there is an overarching general rule: assume there are more changes coming.
It is clear that more scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs are active today
than in all of previous human history. Venture capitalists are developing powerf
ul models for investing-in and growing startup companies, and in the process the
y are acquiring more and more capital as the markets shift away from the smokest
ack industries and toward new models. It is also clear that there is a growing w
orld market in which more entrepreneurs of more nationalities are competing for
more customers than ever in human history.
All this growing momentum of change simply means that no understanding, no refor
m, no principle will be guaranteed to last for very long. Just as we get good at
one thing, or come to understand one principle, it will be challenged by an eme
rging new idea or achievement from a direction we haven't even considered.
Within that humbling sense that the change is so large we will never really know
in our lifetime the full analysis of this process, here are 18 powerful charact
eristics for developing government policy and politics in the Age of Transitions
:
1. COSTS WILL CRASH A major pattern will be a continuing, and in many cases ste
ep, declines in cost. An ATM is dramatically cheaper than a bank teller. A direc
t-dial phone call is much less expensive than an operator-assisted call. My brot
her used Priceline.com and received four airlines tickets for his family for the
price of one regular ticket. We have not even begun to realize how much costs w
ill decline (including health and healthcare, education and learning, defense pr
ocurement and government administration). We also have not yet learned to think
in terms of purchasing power instead of salary. Yet the pattern is likely to be
a huge change in both purchasing power and behavior for both citizens and govern
ment. Those who are aggressive and alert will find remarkable savings by moving
to the optimum cost crashes faster than anyone else. As a result they will drama
tically expand their purchasing power.
2. A CUSTOMER CENTERED PERSONALIZED SYSTEM With Amazon.com and other systems yo
u can look up precisely the books or movies you want and, after a while, they se
nse your interests and they begin to bring items to you that you may like. We ca
n consider a personal Social Security Plus account because we already have perso
nal Roth IRA's and 401k's. We can consider a personal learning and personal heal
th system just as we have e-tickets for our Internet purchased airline tickets.
Anything that is not personalized and responsive to changes in the individual wi
ll rapidly be replaced by something that is.
3. 24-7 IS THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE Customer access 24 hours a day and 7 days a
week will become the standard of the future. ATM's symbolize this emerging custo
mer convenience standard. You can get cash 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, yet to
day's schools combine an agricultural era 9 or 10 month school year (including t
he summer off for harvesting) with an industrial era 50 minute class, with the f
oreman at the front of the room facing a class of workers facing him or her, in
a factory style school day, in a Monday to Friday work week. Learning in the fut
ure will be embedded in the computer and on the Internet and will be available w
ith a great deal of customization for each learner at his or her convenience and
on demand. Similarly, government will have to shift to its customers' needs rat
her than demanding that the customers make themselves available at the bureaucra
t's convenience. These are big changes and they are unavoidable given the emergi
ng technologies and the e-customer culture that is evolving.
4. CONVENIENCE WILL BE A HIGH VALUE As customers get used to one-click shopping
(note the shopping cart approach on Amazon) they will demand similar convenienc
e from government. People will increasingly order products and services to be de
livered to their homes at their convenience. They will initially pay a premium f
or this convenience but over time they will conclude that it is a basic requirem
ent of any business they deal with. After a while e-customers will begin to carr
y these attitudes into their relationship with bureaucracy, and as e-voters they
will favor politicians who work to make their lives easier (and therefore more
convenient).
5. CONVERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGIES WILL INCREASE CONVENIENCE, EXPAND CAPABILITIES, A
ND LOWER COSTS The various computation and communication technologies will rapi
dly converge with cell phones, computers, land-lines, mobile systems, satellite
capabilities and cable all converging into a unified system of capabilities, whi
ch will dramatically expand both capabilities and convenience.
6. EXPERT SYSTEM EMPOWERED PROCESSES When you look up an airline reservation on
the Internet you are dealing with an expert system. In virtually all Internet s
hopping you are actually asking questions of such a system. The great increase i
n capability for dealing with individual sales and individual tastes is a functi
on of the growing capacity of expert systems. These capabilities will revolution
ize health, learning and government once they are used as frequently as they cur
rently are in the commercial world. If it can be codified and standardized it sh
ould be done by an expert system rather than a person. That is a simple rule to
apply to every government activity.
7. MIDDLEMEN DISAPPEAR This is one of the most powerful rules of the Age of Tra
nsitions. In the commercial world, where competition and profit margins force ch
ange, it is clear that customers are served more and more from very flat hierarc
hies, with very few people in the middle. In the protected guilds (medicine, tea
ching, law and any group which can use its political power to slow change) and i
n government structures there are still very large numbers of middlemen. This wi
ll be one of the most profitable areas for political-governmental leaders to exp
lore. In the Age of Transitions the customer should be foremost and every unnece
ssary layer should be eliminated to create a more agile, more rapidly changing,
more customer centered and less expensive system.
8. CHANGES CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE The record of the last thirty years has been
a growing shift toward new ideas coming from new places. Anyone can have a good
idea, and the key is to focus on the power of the idea rather than the pedigree
of the inventor. This directly challenges some of the peer review assumptions of
the scientific community, much of the screening for consultants used by governm
ent, much of the credentialing done by education and medicine, and much of the c
ontractor-certification done by government. This principle requires us to look v
ery widely for the newest idea, the newest product and the newest service, and i
t requires testing by trial and error more than by credentialing or traditional
assumptions.
9. SHIFT RESOURCES FROM OPPORTUNITY TO OPPORTUNITY One of the most powerful eng
ines driving the American economy has been the rise of an entrepreneurial ventur
e capitalism that moves investments to new opportunities and grows those opportu
nities better than any other economy in the world. There is as yet no comparable
government capacity to shift resources to new start-ups and to empower governme
ntal entrepreneurs. There are countless efforts to reform and modernize bureaucr
acies, but that is exactly the wrong strategy. Venture capitalists very seldom p
ut new money into old corporate bureaucracies. Even many of the established corp
orations are learning to create their own startups because they have to house ne
w ideas and new people in new structures if they are really to get the big break
throughs. We need a doctrine for a venture capitalist-entrepreneurial model of g
overnment including learning, health, and defense.
10. THE RAPIDITY OF BETTER, LESS EXPENSIVE PRODUCTS WILL LEAD TO A CONTINUED PRO
CESS OF REPLACEMENT Goods and services will take on a temporary nature as their
replacements literally push them out the door. The process of new, more capable
and less expensive goods and services, and in some cases revolutionary replaceme
nts which change everything (as Xerox did to the mimeograph, and as the fax mach
ine, e-mail and pc have done), will lead to a sense of conditional existence and
temporary leasing that will change our sense of ownership.
11. FOCUS ON SUCCESS Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have a surprisingly
high tolerance for intelligent failure. They praise those who take risks, even i
f they fail, over those who avoid risks, even if they avoid failure. To innovate
and change at the rate the Age of Transitions requires, government and politici
ans have to shift their attitudes dramatically (and it would help if the politic
al news media joined them in this). Today it is far more dangerous for a bureauc
rat to take a risk than it is to do nothing. Today the system rewards (with reti
rement and non-controversy) serving your time in government. There are virtually
no rewards for taking the risks and sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. Ye
t in all the other areas of science, technology, and entrepreneurship the great
breakthroughs often involve a series of failures (consider Edison's thousands of
failed experiments in inventing the electric light and how they would have appe
ared in a congressional hearing or a news media expose). Setting a tone of tryin
g, and rewarding success while tolerating intelligent failure, would do a great
deal to set the stage for a modernized government.
12. VENTURE CAPITALISTS AND ENTREPRENEURS FOCUS ON OPPORTUNITIES This is simila
r to focusing on success but refers to the zone in which energy and resources ar
e invested. It is the nature of politics and government to focus on problems (sc
hools that fail, hospitals that are too expensive, people living in poverty) whe
n the real breakthroughs come from focusing on opportunities (new models of lear
ning that work, new approaches to health and healthcare that lower the cost of h
ospitals, ways to get people to work so they are no longer in poverty). Venture
capitalists are very good at shifting their attention away from problem zones to
ward opportunity zones. Politicians and the political news media tend to do the
opposite. Yet the great opportunities for change and progress are in the opportu
nities rather than the problems.
13. REAL BREAKTHROUGHS CREATE NEW PRODUCTS AND NEW EXPECTATIONS Before Disney W
orld existed it would have been hard to imagine how many millions would travel t
o Orlando. Before the Super Bowl became a cultural event it was hard to imagine
how much of the country would stop for an entire evening.
Before faxes we did not need them, and before e-mail no one knew how helpful it
would be. One of the key differences between the public and private sector is th
is speed of accepting new products and creating new expectations. The public sec
tor tends to insist on using the new to prop up the old. For two generations we
have tried to get the computer into the classroom with minimal results. That's b
ecause it is backward: The key is to get the classroom into the computer and the
computer in the child's home, so learning becomes personal and 24/7. Doctors st
ill resist the information technologies that will revolutionize health and healt
hcare, and which will lower administrative costs and decrease unnecessary deaths
and illnesses dramatically. In the private sector competition and the customer
force change. In government and government protected guilds the innovations are
distorted to prop up the old and the public (that is the customer) suffers from
higher expense and less effective goods and services.
14. SPEED MATTERS: NEW THINGS NEED TO GET DONE QUICKLY There is a phrase in the
Internet industry, "Launch and Learn," which captures the entrepreneurial sense
of getting things done quickly. It suggests that you launch your business or yo
ur new product and learn while you are building it. As one Silicon Valley entrep
reneur suggested, he had moved back from the East because he could get things do
ne in the same number of days in California as the months it would have taken wh
ere he had been. Moving quickly produces more mistakes but it also produces a re
al learning that only occurs by trying things out. The sheer volume of activity,
and the speed of correcting mistakes as fast as they are discovered, allows a "
launch and learn" system to grow dramatically faster than a "study and launch" s
ystem. This explains one of the major differences between the venture capitalist
-entrepreneurial world and the traditional corporate bureaucracies. Since govern
ments tend to study and study without ever launching anything truly new it is cl
ear how even further the gap gets between the public and private sectors in an A
ge of Transitions. Today it takes longer for a Presidential appointee to be clea
red by the White House and approved by the Senate than it takes to launch a star
tup company in Silicon Valley.
15. START SMALL BUT DREAM BIG Venture capital and entrepreneurship are about ba
by businesses rather than small businesses. Venture capitalists know that in a p
eriod of dramatic change it is the occasional home run rather than a large numbe
r of singles that really make the difference. The result is that venture capital
ists examine every investment with a focus on its upside. If it does not have a
big enough growth potential it is not worth the time and energy to make the inve
stment. Government tends to make large risk-averse investments in relatively sma
ll controllable changes. This is almost the exact opposite of the venture capita
l-entrepreneurial model. The question to ask is: "If this succeeds, how big will
the difference be, and if the difference isn't very substantial, we need to kee
p looking for a more powerful proposal."
16. BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS IS THE FIRST BIG PROFIT OPPORTUNITY While most of the
attention in the Internet market is paid to sales to the final customer, the fac
t is that that market is still relatively small and relatively unprofitable. How
ever, there is no question that Internet based systems such as Siebel and Inteli
sys are creating business-to-business opportunities that will dramatically lower
the cost of doing business. Every government, at every level, should be rationa
lizing its purchasing system and moving on to the net to eliminate all paper pur
chasing. The savings in this area alone could be in the 20 to 30 % range for mos
t governments. The opportunities for a paperless system in health and healthcare
could lead to a crash in costs rather than a worry about rising costs.
17. APPLYING QUALITY AND LEAN THINKING CAN SAVE ENORMOUS AMOUNTS Whether it is
the earlier model of quality espoused by Edwards Deming or the more recent conce
pt of lean thinking advocated by James Womack and Daniel Jones, it is clear that
there is an existing model of thinking-through production and value, on a syste
matic basis, and creating more profitable, less expensive approaches. The compan
ies that have really followed this approach have had remarkable success in produ
cing better products at lower expense, yet it is almost never used by people who
want to rethink government.
18. PARTNERING IS ESSENTIAL No company or government can possibly understand a
ll the changes in an Age of Transitions. Furthermore, new ideas will emerge with
great speed. It is more profitable to partner than to try to build in-house exp
ertise. It allows everyone to focus on what they do best while working as a team
on a common goal. This system is prohibited throughout most of government, and
yet it is the dominant organizing system of the current era of startups. As gove
rnment bureaucracies fall further and further behind the most dynamic of the sta
rtups (in part because civil service salaries cannot compete with stock options
for the best talent), it will become more and more important to develop new mech
anisms for government-private partnering.
These initial principles give a flavor of how big the change will be and of the
kind of questions a political-governmental leader should ask in designing a prog
ram for the Age of Transitions. They can be refined, expanded and improved, but
they at least start the process of identifying how different the emerging system
will be from the bureaucratic-industrial system that is the heart of contempora
ry government.
The Principles of Political-Governmental Success
In an Age of Transitions
In the Age of Transitions people will be so busy and the sheer volume of new pro
ducts, new information, and new opportunities will keep people so limited in spa
re time that any real breakthrough in government and politics will have to meet
several key criteria:
1. Personal It has to involve a change that occurs in individual people's lives
in order for them to think it is worth their while, because it will affect them
directly. Only a major crisis such as a steep recession or a major war will bri
ng people back to the language of politics. In the absence of such a national cr
isis political leaders will not be able to attract people into the zone of gover
nment and politics. Instead they will have to take government and politics into
people's lives by using the new technologies and new opportunities of the Age of
Transitions to offer better solutions that will really affect people's lives.
2. Big Ideas The change has to be large enough to be worth the time and effort
of participation. People have to believe that their lives or their family's live
s will really be affected by the proposals or they will simply nod pleasantly at
the little ideas but do nothing to get them implemented. If you would attract m
illions of new people into the process you have to have ideas big enough and per
sonal enough to be worth their time and effort.
3. Common Language New solutions have to be explained in the language of every
day life because people will simply refuse to listen to the traditional language
of political and governmental elites. People have become so tired of the bicker
ing, the conflict, and the reactionary obsolete patterns of traditional politics
that they turn off the minute they hear them. New solutions require new words a
nd the words have to grow out of the daily lives of people rather than out of th
e glossary of intellectual elites or the slogans of political consultants.
4. Practical The successful politics of the Age of Transitions will almost cert
ainly be pragmatic and practical rather than ideological and theoretical. People
are going to be so busy and so harried that their first question is going to be
"will it work?" They will favor conservative ideas they think will work and the
y will favor big government ideas that they think will work. Their first test wi
ll be "will my family and I be better off?" and their second test will be "can t
hey really deliver and make this work?' Only when a solution passes these two te
sts will it be supported by a majority of people. Note that both questions are p
ragmatic and neither is theoretical or ideological.
5. Positive The successful politicians of the Age of Transitions will devote ei
ghty per cent of their time to the development and communication of large positi
ve solutions in the language of everyday life and the gathering of grassroots co
alitions and activists to support their ideas. They will never spend more than t
wenty per cent of their effort on describing the negative characteristics of the
ir opponents. When they do describe the destructive side of their opponents it w
ill be almost entirely in terms of the costs in the lives of Americans of the re
actionary forces blocking the new solutions and the better programs (study FDR's
1936 and 1940 campaigns for models of this lifestyle definition of the two side
s-the helpful and the harmful. FDR was tough on offense but more importantly he
cast the opposition in terms of how they hurt the lives of ordinary people.)
6. Electronic The successful large, personal, positive, practical movement of t
he Age of Transitions will be organized on the Internet and will be interactive.
Citizens will have a stake in the movement and an ability to offer ideas and pa
rticipate creatively in ways no one has ever managed before. The participatory e
xplosion of the 1992 Perot campaign in which tens of thousands of volunteers org
anized themselves and the internet based activism of the closing weeks of the 19
98 Ventura campaign are forerunners of an interactive, internet based movement i
n the Age of Transitions. None has occurred on a sustainable basis yet for two r
easons:
First, no one has come up with a believable solution big enough to justify the o
utpouring of energy beyond brief, personality-focused campaign spasms lasting we
eks or a few months.
Second, no one has mastered the challenge of building a citizen-focused genuinel
y interactive system that allows people to get information when they want it, of
fer ideas in an effective feedback loop, and organize themselves to be effective
in a reasonably efficient and convenient manner. When the size of the solution
and the sophistication of the system come together we will have a new model of p
olitics and government that will be as defining as the thirty-second commercial
and the phone bank have been.
Big Solutions at a Big Event as the Defining
Activity of a National Campaign
Twice Republicans have successfully used "Capitol Steps" events to define their
goals in a dramatic way. In 1980 the Republican Senate and House candidates gath
ered on the Capitol steps with Ronald Reagan and George Bush and made a series o
f key promises including the thirty per cent cut in income tax rates and strengt
hening the military. A month later a number of little known underdog candidates
were elected to the Senate by narrow margins and to almost everyone's surprise t
he Republicans had captured control of the Senate for the first time in nearly a
generation. In elections won by 7,000 and 14,000 votes the final legitimacy and
focus given to the candidate by standing next to Ronald Reagan and pledging big
changes was almost certainly decisive.
In 1994 the Republican House candidates stood together on the Capitol steps and
pledged to implement a Contract with America. Their sincerity and the scale of t
heir proposal changed the campaign and drew nine million additional people to th
e polls.
The two events have to be seen within the context of a long buildup and an inten
sive, focused follow through between the event and the election. In both cases t
he issues had been developed over many months. In both years the candidates had
been using the major issues for months before the big event. In both cases candi
dates and campaigns were poised to take the message home and use advertising, sp
eeches, debates and editorial boards to continue driving home the big solutions.
In both cases outside activists had been recruited, encouraged and coordinated
to continue building the power of the ideas. The events only mattered within the
larger context of these preceding and following activities.
In both cases the key messages were resonating off existing understanding among
the American people rather than trying to communicate or sell something new. Tax
cuts had been a key issue in the 1978 Congressional campaigns, Jack Kemp and Bi
ll Roth had been articulating supply side economics for four years, Reagan had c
ampaigned throughout the spring on the need for a tax cut and it was in the Repu
blican national platform. In 1994 the calls for a balanced budget, welfare refor
m, tax cuts, and stronger defense were the echoes of a generation of conservativ
e and Republican speeches. In both cases we were trying to build a responsive ch
ord with proposals the American people already knew about.
The key is the long development of a set of proposals the Presidential nominee i
s committed to and willing to campaign on, their general acceptance by the party
within the leadership of the Presidential nominee, their articulation throughou
t the spring and summer, their inclusion in the national platform, and their use
during the fall campaign with a decisive symbolic moment occurring as the entir
e team gathers to prove it is a team and to pledge to implement the proposals. O
nly by having a process of this type can the proposals be driven home strongly e
nough to define October.
Proposals Big Enough to Attract the American People and to Define the 2000 Elect
ion on Terms Favorable to Republicans
The following proposals can be explained in the daily lives of Americans, apply
some of the solutions available in the Age of Transitions, and will improve life
enough to be worth the attention and then support of a vast majority of America
ns.
1. Social Security Plus - Every American deserves the right to save a portion of
their FICA tax and control it in a tax-free account which could be invested in
a broad range of instruments. This will save Social Security permanently without
a tax increase or a benefit cut. It will ensure that the poorest worker will ha
ve a savings account within six months of starting to work, and within a few yea
rs will be a saver and investor with a piece of the action.
For younger Americans this can produce retirements at three to six times the wea
lth they will get from the government system and it will protect the system from
collapsing when the baby boomers retire. For older Americans this step, if coup
led with the end of the penalty for working, the abolition of the death tax, and
the guarantee that they would get every penny, including cost of living increas
es which is due them, would reassure them that we had improved their lives.
Social Security Plus is particularly better for African American males who have
a lower life expectancy than other Americans and as a result transfer an average
of $10,000 in FICA Tax to other people. Social Security Plus would allow them t
o pass their savings on to their family and would be a big improvement for Afric
an Americans over the current system.
Hispanics have the lowest rate of savings of any group in the country. Social Se
curity Plus would create, overnight, a retirement savings account for every work
ing Hispanic. It is a powerful tool for increasing the wealth of younger Hispani
cs and Hispanic families.
By transferring well over a trillion dollars from the control of government back
into the private sector Social Security Plus will lower interest rates, increas
e the availability of capital and increase economic growth.
Properly communicated in personal terms and in the language and media of a varie
ty of groups, and with the support of activist-advocates from all those groups,
the advantages of Social Security Plus should draw an entire generation of young
er Americans from all ethnic backgrounds into politics in order to get the refor
m that will dramatically improve their lives and increase their wealth. For more
information see www.Social Security Plus.org.
2. Max Tax - More take-home-pay for every American both in the short run with a
big tax cut and in the long run with lower taxes in general. In everyday languag
e "more take-home-pay" is more real and more powerful than "tax cuts" (which is
a political term which then translates into more take-home-pay).
The current budget surplus gives us an opportunity to have a major tax cut and t
he Age of Transitions gives us an opportunity to modernize and privatize governm
ent until we cap all taxes (state, federal, and local) so that no American pays
more than 25% of their income in total taxation. The two goals are reinforcing b
ut not identical.
First, there should be a large tax cut because the surplus is created by the Ame
rican taxpayer and they deserve their own money back. Furthermore, any money lef
t in Washington will be spent by politicians to expand government and please int
erest groups. Therefore the choice is simple; with a surplus you either have a t
ax cut or bigger government. Thus in the immediate future a big tax cut should b
e favored both to help taxpayers with more take home pay and to keep government
in Washington from growing.
Second, there should be a ten-to-fifteen year goal of modernizing and privatizin
g government to bring all taxation down to a maxtax of 25%. For forty years Amer
icans have told Reader's Digest that they favor a maximum tax of 25% of their in
come. In peacetime if you work all of Monday and part of Tuesday for the governm
ent you should be allowed to work the rest of the week for yourself, your family
, your voluntary charities, your religious institution, and your own retirement.
Readers of Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Olasky's The Tragedy of Americ
an Compassion know that America historically was a very low tax nation. Prior to
1930 there was a 150-year history of limited government with limited taxation i
n peacetime. The theory was that strong citizens and active communities could wo
rk within limited effective government in a pattern that maximized freedom and m
inimized the dangers of dictatorship (this is the heart of the 18th century Whig
critique of the British political system which was the basis of Jefferson's mod
el of government).
We have had a 70-year experiment in large centralized bureaucratic government. A
s Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion makes painfully clear this
experiment was very costly in lives wasted and people trapped in poverty. One of
our greatest achievements was the welfare reform that liberated over fifty perc
ent of the people on welfare and returned them to jobs and to school. In some st
ates we now have so few people on welfare there is a real opportunity to get eve
ry one of them to work.
The next stage after balancing the budget and welfare reform is to set as a goal
the dramatic modernization and privatization of government so that taxes could
be capped at 25% (state, federal, and local combined) of an individual's income.
This may seem a grandiose goal. Yet remember that in 1970 when Governor Ronald
Reagan first proposed welfare reform at the National Governor's Conference he wa
s defeated 49 to 1. Not a single Republican Governor voted with him because the
idea was too bold. By 1996 we had won the argument so decisively that in a New Y
ork Times poll 92% of the American people favored welfare reform including 88% o
f the people on welfare.
America today ranks behind a number of other countries in the successful privati
zation of government functions. Yet the Age of Transitions is going to make poss
ible dramatic improvements in goods and services at lower costs simply by bringi
ng together modern technology, entrepreneurship and venture capital approaches t
o transform obsolete and archaic government services. Consider just a few exampl
es of the changes that are possible and that provide both better services to the
citizen and lower taxes.
First, British and French water systems have never been government run. The resu
lt is a higher level of technology and management skill than most government run
systems. When Atlanta contracted out its water system it saved the city 44% a y
ear. The seven major cities that have privatized their water so far have run fro
m 20 to 50% in savings with the average being about a third. That would amount t
o $500 million a year for New York City if it contracted out its water operation
. The citizens get better water at lower cost.
Second, only 18% of the child support that is due is actually paid to the childr
en. That means 82% of the children who should be getting child support from a re
sponsible adult are being denied the money. Government is so incompetent that $3
billion is actually sitting in the bank because it has been paid but the govern
ment can't find the children. Minimalist attempts at private contracting within
the current system routinely fail because the public employee unions simply sabo
tage them. Apparently, union dues are more important than children. Liberal poli
ticians sympathize with children in poverty, but not enough to fight the unions
that elect them.
Yet we live in an age when Visa, MasterCard and American Express all do a good j
ob of finding their card members and getting them to pay. We live in an age when
private collection companies would make a big profit collecting more money for
more children. Only our commitment to the obsolete model of bureaucratic enforce
ment keeps these millions of children in poverty.
Here is a privatization that would be more compassionate, more humane, and would
enforce responsibility while lifting children from poverty and would lighten th
e burden on the taxpayer all at the same time. This could also be a major commit
ment which would speak to millions of single mothers and to grandparents in imme
diate human terms about directly improving their lives (and as such this item mi
ght become a major proposal in a capitol steps event and in a campaign platform)
.
Third, ZooAtlanta went from being an $800,000 a year city bureaucracy run so bad
ly it was on the verge of losing its accreditation to being a privately run $11m
illion a year research institution of world renown. There is a nationwide move t
oward privatized zoos with entrepreneurial leaders, such as Terry Maples in Atla
nta. It is creating better institutions with more aggressive, creative energy, a
greater focus on the public and much lower cost to the taxpayer.
These are simply three examples of the opportunities for privatization and moder
nization. Any serious look at Europe or Latin America would yield dozens of exam
ples of formerly government run systems now being run better at lower cost and w
ith greater customer satisfaction in the private sector. For more information se
e www.MaxTax.org.
Modernizing and privatizing government to get the maximum tax down to 25% is per
fectly compatible with paying down the federal debt. A smaller debt means smalle
r interest payments and therefore lower taxes. A series of annual debt payments
combined with annual tax cuts would achieve the goal of a smaller debt, a smalle
r government, lower taxes, more take-home pay, and greater economic growth, with
lower interest rates. In 1997 we cut taxes and balanced the budget by controlli
ng government spending. Controlling government spending will allow you to cut ta
xes and pay down the national debt. The alternative is to neither cut taxes nor
pay down the debt but instead divert the money. We should drop the argument of t
ax cuts versus debt reduction and simply do both. Our children will have lower t
axes, better incomes, lower interest rates and a healthier country.
3. End the Death Tax As a simple, single goal we should abolish the death tax i
mmediately. Abolishing the death tax is a 79-15issue (Zogby, January 2000) among
the American people. This is not a new development. In 1982 abolishing the deat
h tax was on the California ballot and it won by 65-35 despite the opposition of
much of the media.
People intuitively know that it is wrong to punish grandparents for saving for t
heir grandchildren. People also intuitively know that if government has already
taxed the money once it should not be able to tax it again. Finally people know
that the very rich use lawyers and trusts to avoid the tax while the real losers
are the workers who lose their jobs when the family business is sold.
This tax hurts economic growth by diverting money to lawyers and loopholes, and
by discouraging economic activity among the elderly. We would have a bigger econ
omy, with faster growth, with more jobs, and with greater wealth if we abolished
the death tax.
4. Use Technology to Empower the Disabled Every American with a disability shou
ld be connected with the best technologies and given the best opportunity to tru
ly pursue happiness as their Creator endowed them with the right to do.
The Age of Transitions is going to create marvelous opportunities to enhance the
lives of Americans and, especially, to improve the lives of Americans with sign
ificant disabilities. We should be committed to doubling scientific research and
development in the federal budget and totally overhauling both the bureaucratic
structures and the anti-work, anti-common sense rules of the federal government
. The 120 federal agencies currently dealing with disabilities administer public
policies that clearly discourage work and undermine families, while encouraging
the warehousing of people in costly institutions. We need to make capital inves
tments in people, rather than "maintaining" them in lifelong dependence on the g
overnment. Citizens with significant disabilities are denied freedom and opportu
nity by existing policies that require them to be indigent and unproductive in o
rder to be eligible for healthcare insurance and other essential supports.
With improved access to technology and opportunities, people who have previously
been perceived as unable to contribute to society can be productive. If we are
to empower citizens with significant disabilities, and if society is to benefit
from their abilities, we must redesign all federal and state disability programs
to foster independence and dignity. The current "maintenance" model is a slow d
eath that fosters dependence and dehumanization. An "empowerment model" will rea
ttach these Americans to life and afford them the same opportunities other citiz
ens take for granted - the opportunities to live, work and learn in their commun
ities.
This is a perfect example of a bold solution in the context of an Age of Transit
ions that simply leaves behind all the bureaucratic rhetoric of the old system.
The new technologies can be developed with stunning speed. The Internet can crea
te markets and opportunities for those with significant disabilities in ways yet
unexplored. Accomplishing reform that reduces the barriers to work for people w
ith disabilities will serve the best interests of both the taxpayer and citizens
with disabilities. Eliminating the institutional bias in Medicaid long-term car
e policy will strengthen American families and enable people with significant di
sabilities of all ages to enjoy lives with greater dignity and independence.
There are hundreds of thousands of severely challenged Americans whose lives wou
ld be dramatically improved by these changes. They, their families and those who
se lives they touch will flock to a movement that takes seriously the challenge
of bringing together the discoveries of science, the creativity of entrepreneurs
and the needs and talents of Americans with disabilities.
5. Health and Healthcare Health and healthcare can be dramatically improved for
virtually every American and in the process the price will come down.
The obsolete system we currently have kills an estimated 98,000 Americans a year
in hospitals by inappropriate medicine (report by the Institute of Medicine). T
wo-thirds of those (about 65,000 dead Americans a year) are caused by inappropri
ate prescriptions for people whose current drug prescriptions or past history ma
ke the new prescription lethal. Hundreds of thousands of additional Americans ar
e re-hospitalized annually through inappropriate prescriptions. The human and fi
nancial cost is a significant part of our health budget.
The Age of Transitions has already invented solutions that would save 50,000 plu
s lives and several billion dollars a year. Doctors should enter their prescript
ions in a palm pilot or other computerized device, patients should have computer
ized health records, and a computer should check each new prescription against t
he patient's record to make sure they will not be killed or sickened by the new
drug. All the technology is available but each part of the system clings to its
obsolete arguments about an earlier era. Only the patient and the society are ha
rmed.
Patients ought to own their own health records and they should be electronic. Bi
lling should be electronic and the patient should be able to review it for accur
acy (imagine a restaurant that refused to let you see the bill). Patients ought
to have access to full knowledge about their health situation and to the most cu
rrent developments that might affect their survival.
Litigation laws must be reformed to protect doctors and hospitals that voluntari
ly report their errors. The system will keep lying to itself and to us if the pr
ice of honesty is a lawsuit that bankrupts. Some system of balance between the r
ight to sue and the vital importance of honest self-reporting must be found.
Citizens should have the true patient's right to take their tax deductibility an
d buy their own health insurance if they don't like the HMO or the insurance com
pany their employer has chosen. Group health insurance as a tax-deductible item
is an accident of a 1943 wage price decision to help workers without increasing
inflation. We do not need to abolish group insurance; we simply need to take the
first step of giving workers the right to take their share of the deduction if
they disagree with their employer's choice.
The argument that individual insurance is too expensive is simply technologicall
y ignorant. Within a year or two the Internet will allow aggregated individual a
ccounts without agents' commissions (unless state laws artificially block them).
If Amazon can sell books then Internet health can sell individual policies at l
ow costs.
Every citizen should be allowed 100% deductibility in buying health insurance so
everyone is on an equal footing. In the Age of Transitions every citizen should
have their own health insurance and this requires a Fair Care approach of creat
ing a focused tax credit for the working poor. It would also require changing Me
dicare and Medicaid into vouchered systems to return the power of purchasing hea
lth insurance back to individual Americans.
The absurdity of the Health Care Financing Administration's 133,000 pages of reg
ulations and the fact that HCFA continues a paper system when clearly every bill
should be electronic (which would save billions of dollars and decrease fraud b
y allowing patient review of their own record) should be all we need to know to
abolish HCFA and replace it with an entrepreneurial model for encouraging the mo
st modern delivery of health and healthcare at the lowest cost.
We should favor doubling the federal science budget as rapidly as possible and a
cross the board. As the public follows events like Michael J. Fox's battle with
Parkinson's disease, there is a growing constituency for finding solutions. The
movement that recognizes the value of scientific advance and is prepared to make
it an extremely high priority will have a vast coalition of people who support
that goal. The investment should be broad rather than narrowly focused on the Na
tional Institutes of Health because the basic sciences such as math, physics, an
d chemistry provide the underlying principles and technologies that make possibl
e the scientific advances at NIH. For example, brain sciences require a signific
ant investment in mathematics and physics to develop the tools to study the huma
n brain as it is operating.
6. Learning Learning is a primary requirement of success in the Age of Transiti
ons. Everyone will have to learn all his or her lives. Our current failure in bu
reaucratic, government-run education is clearly a threat to our success in the n
ext quarter century. Some key steps need to be taken:
First, learning must be seen as lifetime and wherever possible systems should be
learner focused, Internet based and available on a 24/7 basis.
Second, every school should deliver good education or be closed. Children should
not be sacrificed for union dues or bureaucratic comfort.
Third, every child deserves a publicly financed education but their parents shou
ld determine whether the school is meeting their child's needs and if the school
is failing the parents should have the right to send their child to a school (p
ublic or private) that they believe will prepare their child for a lifetime of w
ork and citizenship.
Fourth, teachers should have a disciplined environment in which to focus on teac
hing. Master teachers and star teachers should be paid commercially competitive
salaries. Teaching should become an entrepreneurial and missionary endeavor and
great teachers should have access to stock options, salaries and bonuses that ma
ke teaching a competitive profession again (note the measure is student success
not accreditation, certification, years in service, etc.) Startups and companies
could be encouraged by tax breaks and changes in SEC rules to donate stock to p
ools for star and master teachers. The first teacher millionaire who earned the
money by education achievement would dramatically change a lot of thinking about
teaching as a profession.
Fifth, colleges and universities are unnecessarily expensive. There are dozens o
f new technologies and systems in the Age of Transitions that can lower the cost
of higher education and make it dramatically more accessible for all Americans.
There are virtually no incentives, and a lot of roadblocks and hostilities, to
any effort to modernize and rationalize higher education, and yet the cost to th
e family, the taxpayer, and the student are growing absurd. We should be for bet
ter learning, at lower cost, and with greater convenience for all Americans.
7. Safety and National Defense There are at least seven major steps we must tak
e to rebuild America's strength and provide for our security in an increasingly
dangerous world:
A. Focus resources on helping Colombia win its war against the drug cartel. Colo
mbia is vastly more important to America's immediate interests than Kosovo or Bo
snia and yet we have starved the war in Colombia and ignored the needs of our ne
ighbor. We should undertake all steps necessary to support democracy in Colombia
and to destroy the drug cartels' ability to survive in that country.
B. Build a global missile defense system that is capable of protecting our troop
s on overseas deployments, our allies' cities, and our homeland. Such a system c
an only work if it is space based. We could someday lose a city or an expedition
ary force because the diplomats and the lawyers prevailed over the scientists an
d the engineers. We should be committed to building the best system we can devel
op and giving our people and our allies the maximum protection against a limited
missile attack.
C. We need a much more sophisticated intelligence capability if we are to monito
r terrorist groups, a wide variety of countries, and several emerging centers of
power simultaneously. There will be a great need for more human intelligence ab
out terrorists and for more human analysis about complex events. Those who compl
ain that the intelligence agencies overlook things should realize that intellige
nce is even more thinly stretched than the military and that the requirements of
a decentralized real time world have dramatically expanded the burden on the in
telligence agencies. We will also have to rethink hiring and salary policies if
the intelligence agencies are to have any access to the new sciences that have a
ttracted venture capital support and priced government out of the market.
D. We must completely overhaul the failed policies of not protecting our secrets
. From penetration of the political process by Chinese and Indonesian sources to
penetration of the nuclear laboratories by foreign spies to a scathing report b
y the State Department Inspector General there has been a government-wide failur
e to protect American secrets. This has to be reversed and American security has
to be reestablished.
E. The danger of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological and chemical)
is so great, and the loss of life would be so major, that a Homeland Defense sys
tem must be established to prepare for the health, security, and reconstruction
requirements of a terrorist or rogue state attack on one or more American cities
using a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon of mass destruction. The danger
is greater than people believe and the complications of dealing with such an att
ack are enormous. A prepared America could save hundreds of thousands and possib
ly millions of lives. This requires a coordinated effort by the military, the Fe
deral Emergency Management Administration, the Center for Disease Control, the F
BI and state and local authorities.
F. Research and development should be launched to develop a next generation mili
tary and intelligence capability. The Age of Transitions will require a series o
f leapfrog disruptive technological advances if the United States is to maintain
its current lead over the rest of the world. The tendency of all bureaucracies
is to focus on risk avoiding incremental change. In a period of dramatic scienti
fic and technological advance that will allow others to catch up with us. Our go
al should be to create a bloc obsolescence of the current American defense syste
m and its replacement with a next generation model around 2010 and then a second
replacement wave around 2020.
G. The Pentagon remains a massively hierarchical bureaucracy in a world of small
venture start-ups. Our goal should be to symbolically reduce the Pentagon to a
triangle by eliminating at least forty per cent of the mid level management, dec
entralizing and returning focus to the forces in the field rather than the burea
ucracy in the city.
8. Safety at Home People have every right to demand that government keep them a
nd their families safe. Protecting ourselves from violence is one of the most im
portant obligations of government. In the current setting we need to take three
decisive steps toward a safer America. Two of them are short term and the third
is long term:
First, we have to focus the resources to win the war on drugs. We have to sharpe
n the focus on discouraging drug use in America. A decline in drug use has a sig
nificant impact on violence and we have all too often focused on almost anything
but winning the war on drugs.
Second, the program developed in Richmond, Virginia to lock up felons who are pi
cked up with guns has dramatically lowered the violent crime rate in Richmond. I
t is a federal program that works without registering guns. By focusing on crimi
nals crime goes down. We will expand the proven success of creating safer cities
to every part of the country by focusing on the criminal rather than harassing
the innocent. If this program were currently in use across America thousands of
innocent people would be safe who will become victims of violent crime due to ou
r failure to expand this program. We will save those citizens and their families
by aggressively going after the guilty.
Third, over the long run we have to reintegrate adolescents, and especially adol
escent males, into adult society. The Age of Transitions will create many opport
unities for young people to be engaged in far more exciting activities than stan
ding on a street corner being led by a peer their own age. This is a longer term
solution but in the most violent and lost parts of our culture nothing less tha
n reintegration into healthy relations with adults and opportunities to do real
work for real rewards will suffice to keep some young people from decaying into
destructive and self destructive behaviors.
9. Scientifically Based Environmentalism The Age of Transitions is going to mak
e possible dramatically more powerful understanding of the environment and of ho
w we can manage our role on the planet to have optimum biodiversity and economic
growth. We should pioneer breaking out of the current regulatory-litigious-bure
aucratic and political sloganeering approach to the environment and develop a mu
ch more powerful and positive model of integrating scientific knowledge into dec
ision making.
Global warming is a perfect example of the gap between scientific knowledge and
political rhetoric. Tens of billions of dollars have been allocated for various
Kyoto Conference agreements and other measures to "fix" a problem that is consid
ered "conventional wisdom" in the political world. However, we are learning new
information every day that casts, at the very least, a reasonable doubt as to ho
w much we actually know about the existence of global warming or its potential c
auses.
We have just learned, for instance, about a new phenomenon - only 3 years in dis
covery - called the Pacific Dacadal Oscillation, which scientists believe may pu
t us on the brink of a change in climate patterns that could last 20 or 30 years
(Washington Post, 1/20/00). It affects the Pacific Ocean - a third of the earth
's surface - and these scientists believe it would take ten years of data before
they could "declare with confidence" that they knew what it meant, because it i
nvolves fluctuations and reversals in temperature, and has the potential to affe
ct weather from China to the Sahara.
Rather than having an ideological fight over global warming we should insist tha
t the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NSF, NASA and the N
ational Academy of Sciences develop a ten-year thorough strategy for dramaticall
y increasing our understanding of weather and climate. Only then will we have th
e knowledge to make decisions about large changes in the society.
Similarly many of our clean air problems will be solved if hydrogen fuel cell te
chnology continues to develop.
Finally a sophisticated monitoring system for the rain forests, combined with co
rporate leadership in developing strategies for protecting the rain forests, cou
ld lead to a dramatic improvement in their survivability.
These are examples of a more aggressive science and technology, modern managemen
t and free enterprise based approach to a healthier environment, greater biodive
rsity, a growing economy, and expanded freedom.
The Particular Challenge for 2000
For change to be successful in 2000 it is essential that we sincerely and aggres
sively communicate in ways that are inclusive and not exclusive, particularly wi
th the Hispanic population. Our political system cannot sustain effectiveness wi
thout being inclusive. There are two principle reasons this strategy must be pur
sued:
1. A majority in the Age of Transitions will be inclusive. The American people h
ave reached a decisive conclusion that they want a unified nation with no discri
mination, no bias and no exclusions based on race, religion, sex or disability.
A party or movement that is seen as exclusionary will be a permanent minority. T
he majority in the Age of Transitions will have solutions that improve the lives
of the vast majority of Americans and will make special efforts to recruit acti
vists from minority groups, to communicate in minority media, and to work with e
xisting institutions in minority communities. For Republicans this will mean a m
ajor effort to attract and work with every American of every background. Only a
visibly aggressively inclusive Republican Party will be capable of being a major
ity in the Age of Transitions.
2. The ultimate arbiter of majority status in the next generation will be the Hi
spanic community. The numbers are simple and indisputable. If Hispanics become R
epublican the Republican Party is the majority Party for the foreseeable future.
If Hispanics become Democrat the Republican Party is the minority Party for at
least a generation. On issues and values Hispanics are very open to the Republic
an Party. On historic affinity and networking among professional politicians and
activist groups Democrats have an edge among Hispanics. There should be no high
er priority for American politicians than reaching out to and incorporating Hisp
anics at every level in every state. Governors George W. and Jeb Bush have prove
n Republicans can be effectively inclusive and create a working partnership with
Hispanics. Every elected official and every candidate should follow their examp
le.
Conclusion
These are examples of the kind of large changes that are going to be made availa
ble and even practical by the Age of Transitions. The movement and Party which f
irst understands the potential of the Age of Transitions, develops an understand
ing of the operating principles of that Age, applies them to creating better sol
utions, and then communicates those solutions in the language of everyday life w
ill have a great advantage in seeking to become a stable, governing majority.
This paper outlines the beginning of a process as big as the Progressive Era or
the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, the Republicans, the New Deal, or the conserva
tive movement of Goldwater and Reagan. This paper outlines the beginning of a jo
urney not its conclusion. It will take a lot of people learning, experimenting,
and exploring over the next decade to truly create the inevitable breakthrough.