The Paper Belt

Today is the first time I saw this term and it deserves a mention because it makes novel conceptual connections.

The Paper Belt is an informal analogic term referring to the four metropolitan areas where several important industries and political infrastructures converged during the post-war era: Boston (education), New York (publishing, finance), Los Angeles (media, Hollywood) and Washington DC (politics, law).

Some alternative definitions focus on the northeastern coast of the United States by excluding Los Angeles and including Delaware, where a large number of corporations are legally headquartered due to its more generous tax laws for corporations.

It came into attention after Balaji Srinivasan's 2013 talk titled Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. In the context of the talk, the term was used as a contrast with the emerging influence-structure of Silicon Valley.

From here. Hat tip to Wired.

The breathless and excited original speech the spawned the term says in some key excerpts:

So what I’m going to talk about today is something I’m calling Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. So as motivation here, it’s a bit topical: is the USA the Microsoft of nations? We can take this sort of thing and we can expand it: codebase is 230 years old, written in an obfuscated language; system was shut down for two weeks straight; systematic FUD on security issues; fairly ruthless treatment of key suppliers; generally favors its rich enterprise customers but we still have to buy it.

And if we think about Microsoft itself, there’s a great quote from Bill Gates in 1998: what displaced Microsoft, what did he fear, it wasn’t Oracle or anybody like that, what he feared were some guys in a garage, who happened to be ultimately Larry and Sergey back in 1998.

And the thing about what Larry and Sergey did is: there’s no way they could have reformed Microsoft from the inside. At that time, Microsoft already had 26,000 employees; joining its numbers as 26,000 and 26,001 and trying to push for 20% time or free lunches… they probably wouldn’t have gone too far. So what they had to do was start their own company: they had to exit. And with success in that alternative, then Microsoft would imitate them. And this is actually related to a fundamental concept in political science: the concept of voice versus exit. A company or a country is in decline, you can try voice, or you can try exit. Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas exit is leaving to create a new system, a new startup, or to join a competitor sometimes. Loyalty can modulate this; sometimes that’s patriotism, which is voluntary, and sometimes it’s lock-in, which are involuntary barriers to exit.

And we can think about this in the context of various examples and start to get a feel for this. So voice in the context of open source would be a patch; exit would be a fork. Voice in the context of a customer would be a complaint form, whereas exit would be taking your business elsewhere. Voice in the context of a company, that’s a turnaround plan; exit is leaving to found a startup. And voice in the context of a country is voting, while exit is emigration. So if there are those two images on the left is the Norman Rockwell painting on voice; on the right is actually my dad in the center, and that’s a grass hut on the right-hand side, so he grew up on a dirt floor in India, and left, because India was an economic basket case and there’s no way that he could have voted to change things within his lifetime, so he left.

And it turns out that, while we talk a lot about voice in the context of the US and talk about democracy… that’s very important, but you know, we’re not just a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of emigrants: we’re shaped by both voice and exit, starting with the Puritans, you know, they fled religious persecution; the American Revolutionaries which left England’s orbit, then we started moving west, leaving the East Coast bureaucracy to go to the Western nations; later, late 1800s, Ellis Island, people leaving pogroms, and in the 20th century fleeing Nazism and Communism. And sometimes people didn’t just come here for a better life; they came here to save their life. That’s, you know, the airlifting at the end of Saigon.

And it’s not just the US that’s shaped by exit; Silicon Valley itself is also shaped by exit. You can date it back to the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor with the Traitorous Eight, the founding of Fairchild… the fact that non-competes are not enforceable in California, and the fact that DC funds disruption, not just turnaround. The concept of forking in open source, if you think about the back button, that is, in some ways, the cheapest way to exit something. And of course the concept of the startup itself. That right there, if you guys haven’t seen, is one of Y Combinator’s first ads. Larry and Sergey won’t respect you in the morning.

So the concept here is that exit is actually an extremely important force in complement to voice, and it’s something that gives voice its strength. In particular, it protects minority rights. In the upper left corner, for example, you imagine two countries, and country 1 is following policy A, and country 2 is following policy B. Some minority is potentially interested in following policy B, but policy A is very stridently promulgated by the majority. However, there’s some other country, maybe a smaller country, maybe another country, that’s actually quite into B, and so that person leaves. And they’re not necessarily super into B, but they think it might be interesting, thus B question mark. And what happens is that all the other guys in A see that people are actually leaving. They really care about this particular policy so much that they actually left. It could be a feature where people are leaving for a competitor; it could be a bug that you haven’t fixed so people fork the project and take it somewhere else—what happens is that exit amplifies voice. So it’s a crucial additional feature for democracy is to reduce the barrier to exit, to make democratic voice more powerful, more successful. And so a voice gains much more attention when people are leaving in droves. And I would bet that exit is a reason why half of this audience is alive. Many of us have our ancestors who came from China, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, places where there’s war or famine, economic basket cases. Exit is something that I believe we need to preserve, and exit is what this talk is about.

So exit is really a meta-concept: it’s about alternatives. It’s a meta-concept that subsumes competition, forking, founding, and physical emigration. It means giving people tools to reduce influence of bad policies on their lives without getting involved in politics: the tools to peacefully opt out. And if you combine those three things: this concept of the US is the Microsoft of nations, the quote from Gates, and Hirschman’s treatise [ed. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States] you get this concept of Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. Basically, I believe that the ability to reduce the importance of decisions made in DC in particular without lobbying or sloganeering is going to be extremely important over the next ten years. And you might ask, “Why? What does this have to do with anything?” So the reason why is that today it’s Silicon Valley versus what I call the Paper Belt. So there’s four cities that used to run the United States in the postwar era: Boston with higher ed; New York City with Madison Avenue, books, Wall Street, and newspapers; Los Angeles with movies, music, Hollywood; and, of course, DC with laws and regulations, formally running it. And so I call them the Paper Belt, after the Rust Belt of yore. And in the last twenty years, a new competitor to the Paper Belt arose out of nowhere: Silicon Valley. And by accident, we’re putting a horse head in all of their beds. We are becoming stronger than all of them combined.

And to get a sense of this: Silicon Valley is reinventing all of the industries in these cities. That X up there is supposed to be a screenplay, the paper of LA, and LA is going to iTunes, BitTorrent, Netflix, Spotify, Youtube… that was really the first on the hit list, starting in ’99 with Napster. New York right alongside: AdWords, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Kindle, Aereo. We’re going after newspapers; we’re going after Madison Avenue; we’re going after book publishing; we’re going after television. Aereo figured out how to put a solid-state antenna in a server farm so you don’t have to pay any TV fees for all of their recording. Recently Boston was next in the gunsights: Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity. And most interestingly, DC, and by DC I’m using it as a metonym for government regulation in general, because it’s not just DC: it includes local and state governments. Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Square, and the big one, Bitcoin… all things that threaten DC’s power. It is not necessarily clear that the US government can ban something that it wants to ban anymore.

The cause of this is something I call the Paper Jam. The backlash is beginning. More jobs predicted for machines, not people; job automation is a future unemployment crisis looming. Imprisoned by innovation as tech wealth explodes, Silicon Valley, poverty spikes… they are basically going to try to blame the economy on Silicon Valley, and say that it is iPhone and Google that done did it, not the bailouts and the bankruptcies and the bombings, and this is something which we need to identify as false and we need to actively repudiate it. So we must respond via voice: the obvious counterargument is that Valley reduces prices. The top is a little small, but that’s a famous graph: consumption spreads faster today. That shows the absolute exponential rise of technologies over the last century. Anything that is initially just the province of the one percent, whether it be computers or cell phones, quickly becomes the province of the five percent and the ten percent, that ??? that barely works that someone is willing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for allows you to fix the bugs, to get economies of scale, to bring it to the ten percent and the twenty percent and the fifty percent and the middle class and the 99 percent. That’s how we got cell phones from a toy for Wall Street to something that’s helping the poorest of the poor all over the world. Technology is about reducing prices. The bottom curve there is Moore’s Law. And by contrast, the Paper Belt raises them. There’s the tuition bubble and the mortgage bubble and the medical care bubble and too many bubbles to name. The argument that the Valley is a problem is incoherent, but it’s not going to be sufficient to respond via voice. We can make this argument, but the ultimate counterargument is actually exit. Not necessarily physical exit, but exit in a variety of different forms. What they’re basically saying is: rule by DC means people are going back to work and the emerging meme is that rule by us is rule by Terminators. We’re going to take all the jobs. Whereas we can say, and we can argue, DC’s rule is more like an overrun building in Detroit, and down right there is a Google data center. And so we can go back and forth verbally, but ultimately this is about counterfactuals: they have aircraft carriers; we don’t. We don’t actually want to fight them. It wouldn’t be smart.

So we want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like without actually affecting anyone who still believes the Paper Belt is actually good. That’s where exit comes in. So what do I mean by this? What do I mean by Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit? It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years.

Owning, Renting and Sharing

There are basically two ways to be more economically efficient, by which I mean getting more beneficial use ("utility" in economics-speak) out of the same resources.

One is with technology, and the other is by sharing.

Americans love to become more economically efficient through technology.  They like robot filled factories that produce more widgets with fewer employees.  They like hybrid electric cars that get more miles to the gallon.  They like more efficient tools, like e-filing that lets a lawyer or paralegal in a few minutes without killing a forest full of trees do the job of copying and delivering legal documents to a court and the other parties that used to full time employees who did nothing but run photocopiers, stamp and address envelopes and deliver them to the post office where more employees hand deliver the packages of documents with a three day lag, and racing to court house clerk's offices with copies to file stamp to prove delivery as the close of the business day looms.

But, sharing, while considered old school and low technology, offers some of the low hanging fruit when it comes to getting similar or better economic benefits without technological advances.

Suppose that our factory is making not widgets, but treadmills.  Sharing treadmills in gyms and community centers can allow everyone who wants to use a treadmill to do so, even if your factory produces only a tiny fraction of treadmills it would otherwise, compared to having everyone who wants to use a treadmill buying one themselves.

The most energy efficient, mass produced, gasoline fueled car in America today is the high tech hybrid Toyota Prius.  But, per passenger mile traveled, a 1950s era old bus running a quarter full is more fuel efficient, and if it is running full, it is also probably less polluting per passenger mile traveled.

E-filing is efficient, but you can get almost as efficient in the process of disseminating legal documents with pre-printing press technology, by putting up a big cork board in a room in the courthouse and having people who are filing legal papers tack their filing to it for all to see, sharing the single written copy.

Americans, however, do not love sharing.  College students clamor for single rooms.  Many building codes won't allow apartment buildings to be built with bathrooms or showers that are shared by more than a single family outside specialized contexts like dormitories or campgrounds or private or community center gyms.  You could house people in climate controlled storage units that currently rent for about $200 per month, if you could find ways for people to share kitchen and bath facilities at an affordable price for a modest additional fees.  In Europe, you see significant amounts of hostel housing on something similar to this basis.  If the residents were Boy Scouts, or members of the same church, or upper middle class people for one reason or another, or just very homogeneous culturally when it comes to the values involves in sharing space so personally and intimately, this would even work.  Many people alive in Japan have lived in housing where the only available baths and showers were in shared bathhouses outside their homes.  But, our experience in the highly heterogeneous society of the United States is informed by bad apples who abuse common facilities like these, and also by a history of affluence that has allowed us for a long time to pay the price of the economic inefficiencies that come with privacy and with the prevalent use of private property that is rarely shared.

Americans underfund our community centers, and buy lots of private household treadmills.  We rarely take the bus and often drive in single occupancy vehicles owned and usually used only by the single user. We have historically preferred to put legal notices in individual newspaper sections that nobody reads that are delivered to hundreds of thousands of people to posting legal notices on a cork board in a public place frequented by almost all of the people who would read them in the newspaper.

Certainly, there are people who use certain kinds of property regularly and for almost all of the time that anyone else might want to use it instead, and sharing isn't viable for that kind of property.  I spend a large share of all ordinary work hours for ordinary people working in my office, and frequently and without warning also used it in the evenings and one the weekends, when few people need office space.

I use my laptop computer all day long at work, and many hours at home.  I wear my belt and my shoes all day long, and sharing clothes is also complicated by the fact that people come in lots of shapes and sizes.  No one else in my household, or for that matter, for a few houses along up and down my block, would find that my clothes fit them.  So, opportunities for sharing clothes with someone else in the same time period are greatly reduced.

But, lots of individual ownership of consumption property is wildly inefficient.  Most people who own boats use them personally fewer than thirty days a year.  The same is true of most vacation homes and pied a terre apartments in New York City who make up a substantial part of all of Manhattan's housing stock.

Sharing is much cheaper.

My father used to talk about the efficiency of the Army motor pool.  You could use the car you needed for the trip you were going to take, on demand, and return it to the motor pool when you were done, while others used the same vehicle when you didn't need it.

As small family of modest means can share a single bathroom workably and a one bathroom house is much less expensive than a three or four bedroom house.

Car pooling is much cheaper than driving single occupancy vehicles to work, so long as you can find a stable group of people with whom to pool your rides.

The trouble is that for sharing to work you need everyone or very nearly everyone in the group of people that participate have sufficient social skills to behave appropriately in public.  Two or three troublemakers on a bus can turn a ride into an unpleasant experience at best and a safety threatening nightmare, at worst.  The same is true of school classrooms or public swimming pools or public bathrooms.

Even the most elemental and small scale forms of sharing that are nearly universal do not come without some strife.  The single biggest source of conflict between the current generation of school aged children and their parents, and a major source of conflict between spouses or other couples that cohabit, involves disputes over household chores and standards of household cleanliness.  Intentional communities like college co-operative housing and co-housing projects, find that their members spend inordinate amounts of time in meetings and discussions over household management.  One of the oldest forms of sharing, polygamy, is famous in practice for infighting between sister wives.

A society needs an immense amount of social capital, culturally shared norms about public behavior ("civic virtues"), and group cohesion for sharing solutions to work well.  A deeper examination of who has those norms and how those norms are developed is a topic for another day.

Between the highly inefficient but conflict free approach of individual owners of property that isn't intensely used by a single owner, and the highly efficient but socially demanding regime of sharing, there is the intermediate bridge of renting.

Much of what people are describing as a "sharing economy" is really a new, pervasive rental economy made possible with technology.

Take the Car2Go program.  In this program, there is one Smart Car per hundred subscribers (about 35,000 subscribers and 350 cars in Denver, for example).  Subscribers go up to any car on the street, or reserve one for only a bit more than the brief period of time needed to get to it, swipe their card, get in, and drive where they want.  They pay by the minute (more or less) with all costs from fuel to maintenance to insurance to car payments to parking covered by the payment.  When their done, they leave the car anywhere within the "home" region for the car (previously about 50 square miles but soon to be reduced to about 24 square miles).  Downtown, a Car2Go Smart Car may be used 19 times a time, although the program works less well at its fringes where a car may go unused for a couple of days at a time in a lower density residential neighborhood.

Several other "car share" programs work on similar principles, as do a "bike share" program in Denver and many other cities.

AirBnB, a short term residence renting exchange, is similarly a rental based economy that is facilitated in ways that previously might not have worked, using the Internet.  Before AirBnB there were real bed and breakfasts that turned homes into temporary housing on a fee for service basis.

Homeowners and small contractors rent pickup trucks and rarely used expensive major tools from Home Depot so that they can access resources that would otherwise only be available to larger scale contractors who can make these expensive tools earn their keep by using them regularly.

Between the private plane and a commercial flight, there are charter jets that allow you to rent a private plane and a pilot for a few hours or a few days, rather than buying the entire jet and keeping the pilot on salary, something that only the biggest corporations and wealthiest multimillionaires could afford.

Renting from a single owner of property can resolve many of the difficult political and social skills issues involved in sharing property that aren't present in ownership, while still allowing multiple people to use something valuable.

One can even describe many financing arrangements as a form of renting.

As a footnote for further consideration, lets get back to sharing.  One of the keys to making sharing work in a society that isn't highly homogeneous and lacks universal strong civic virtues is exclusion. In a society where only 10% or 50% or 80% of the population is cohesive enough to make sharing a gym a viable solution, sharing is still possible, so long as the people in that society who are capable of sharing form private clubs that exclude people who lack the shared social norms necessary to make sharing work.

For example, before the condominium form of ownership allowed people to separately finance, tax and alienated units in multifamily housing buildings and minimize sharing by placing a corporation called a homeowner's association in charge of common elements of the building, pro-social New York City residents used the sharing based solution of cooperative housing units with a single mortgage for the entire building to achieve similar ends and limited the downsides of sharing through exclusion by carefully interviewing and vetting prospective fellow cooperative housing co-owners. Exclusion is one of the most natural ways to solve the sharing problem and unlock the immense economic efficiency that sharing can product, if private ownership or rental based solutions aren't possible or desirable for some reason.

American discomfort with the exclusion (for a variety of entirely legitimate deep historical reasons like our legacy of slavery that gave way to de jure segregation that breed anti-racist distrust for private sector attempts to recreate de jure racial segregation, and collective memories of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism that affects many American's recent ancestors), which are necessary to make sharing work in many of its more heterogeneous communities, is one reason that many Americans (especially in communities that aren't homogeneous ethnically) are so uncomfortable with sharing solutions and opt instead to rent and own to what would otherwise be economically inefficient degrees.

Instead, Americans prefer to either exclude in only subtle, non-de jure ways (like ethnic identity clubs that in principle aren't allowed to discriminate against members who aren't part of that ethnicity), or to actively inculcate social virtues that facilitate sharing with active policing of anti-social conduct (e.g. Americans have used relatively strict enforcement of traffic laws and tort remedies for careless driving by international standards in order to develop widespread norms of safe driving habits in the use of commonly shared road resources that have produced adherence to traffic law in the U.S. that are unrivaled almost everywhere in the world except Scandinavia and Japan).

But, because these aren't particularly efficient solutions to the problem of sharing with people are abuse their use of the shared resource, we remain a less sharing people than we might be.

(There is also an alternative view on these conundrums focused on clannishness and its opposite, with a partially biological route associated with inbreeding, but that perspective is beyond the scope of this post.)

Co-Creating Post-Christian Culture

The United States is more secular now than it has been at any point the early 1800s before the Second Great Awakening (ca. 1790-1860 CE, flourishing from about 1820-1855 CE) that gave birth to the uniquely American variety of Evangelical Christianity.

The United States now has tens of millions of secular people, who more or less independently came to the same decision to leave Christianity (for the vast majority of secular Americans are former Christians), at about the same time, for similar reasons, on a grass roots basis.

But, they are collectively faced with an omnipresent question, "now what"?  How shall I live my life from day to day?  What traditions shall I honor?  What do I believe?  What is moral and what is not? Into what worldview to I frame my experiences?

We have models abroad for how to live in a more secular society.

Europe experienced a similar surge in secularism a generation or two before the United States did, and is now to a great extent a post-Christian society for whom the state religions of their ancestors are now shared cultural legacies, rather than faiths lived on a day to day basis.  Churches are empty, or filled with immigrants and the elderly who haven't experienced a similar transition.

Japan, while not precisely a secular society, has also never been dominated by Christianity or Islam. Individual Japanese individuals can transition from a state in which superstition was taken more seriously, to one in which superstition is taken less seriously, without as much of an abrupt change of worldview, like a child gradually outgrowing childhood superstitions, one by one.  Japan provides another model of how to have a society that does not live in the shadow of Christianity.

Communist countries that once made up much of the world also consciously and actively collectively disavowed religion, and now that Communism had become obsolete in Europe and much of the rest of the world, and become untethered from its intellectual foundations in places like China, religion is creeping back.  But, a multitude of former Communists have not returned to religion after abandoning the religion of Communism and now face a religious vacuum of their own in which they too must craft of new set of folkways.

The process of creating new folkways is democratic in the small "d" sense of the word.  No choices about how to live are neutral and so everyone must participate in formulating their own, whether or not they want to do so, both individually and in relation to larger, often grass roots, social movements.

This transitional period won't last forever.  Folkways, traditions and norms that are congealing into a new culture right now will solidify over time and may have become rigid for an indefinite future of many centuries within a few generations from now.

It will be natural to answer many questions, particularly as they pertain to metaphysics, with science: the evolution of all life from a common ancestor billions of years ago; an understanding of biodiversity and neurodiversity informed by genetics, the Big Bang and its associated cosmology, a universe where everything is governed by laws of nature exemplified by the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity, or their successors, a blurring of the mind-body duality, an understanding of how much of what happens in the world is random or at least amoral.

Other questions aren't as amenable to consensus scientific answers.  Science can tell us a lot about gender and sexuality, but it can't tell us, by itself, what kind of personal and intimate relations to develop, even if it can inform our understanding of the choices we make.  It can't tell us how to govern ourselves or raise our children, even though its methods can inform those choices as well.  It can't tell us who to trust, or who to love, who to chose as allies, or what battles and wars we should wage.  It can't tell us when to forgive and when to bear a grudge.  Even if science and the scientific method can inform many of these aspects of our lives, it hasn't reached that point yet, and the questions we face in life must be answered, now, immediately, with the knowledge that we have and not the knowledge that we hope some day as a species to acquire.

Even if almost everyone becomes effectively non-religious, there is no reason to think that we will not have, as the Ancient Greeks and Romans did, competing philosophies of life that each claim large numbers of adherents and guide the lives of those who follow them.  It isn't obvious at the moment what the competing philosophies will be, but it seems to me a near certainty that they will emerge over some point that is unknowable in the present in some respect that does not decisively disadvantage one view over another.  I wouldn't even be surprised if the new competing philosophical schools track to a significant extent historical patterns of regional culture, religion and political identity.

Perhaps, for example, secular people will fall into camps of optimists and pessimists, with pessimism gaining more steam in places like the former Communist states and the American South, and optimism finding more purchase in Western Europe, the Northeast Corridor and the Pacific Coast of the United States.  Science can certainly not tell us if optimism is preferable to pessimism, or visa versa, and each outlook offers certain advantages in life to its adherents. Ideas like the Gaia hypothesis might be embraced by optimists, for example, while pessimists may breath new life into the Medea hypothesis, since it better fits with their philosophy.

Or, perhaps instead, we will be split between communitarians and libertarians, or between humanists and nihilists, or between people committed to "traditional humanity" and transhumanists.

I don't believe that there is nothing new under the sun.  Cultural innovators among those of us cursed to live in this exciting time may, faced with the necessity of innovation, may come up with new kinds of relationships, new kinds of foods, new kinds of celebrations, and new kind of rituals and beliefs. The more untethered we become from our cultural legacies, the more room there is (and need there is) for cultural innovation.

Rivals of the Hebrew and Navajo language have required mass invention of new words to describe concepts absent from the historic versions of these languages, and a changing world will likewise require cultural innovation to deal with unprecedented realities and circumstances.

The difficult but worthwhile part of the venture it to image and guess what could emerge.  The results will seem obvious and elementary and inevitable in hindsight, but are anything but if we try to imagine the outcomes prospectively with any degree of confidence.

Is Deer Trail's Town Council On The Verge Of Committing Treason?

Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies; giving them aid and comfort.

- United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 (1789) (in the pertinent part).

The small town of Deer Trail, Colorado is considering a bold move. The town board will be voting on an ordinance that would create drone hunting licenses and offer bounties for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Deer Trail resident, Phillip Steel, drafted the ordinance.

“We do not want drones in town,” said Steel. “They fly in town, they get shot down.”

Even though it’s against the law to destroy federal property, Steel’s proposed ordinance outlines weapons, ammunition, rules of engagement, techniques, and bounties for drone hunting.

The ordinates states, “The Town of Deer Trail shall issue a reward of $100 to any shooter who presents a valid hunting license and the following identifiable parts of an unmanned aerial vehicle whose markings and configuration are consistent with those used on any similar craft known to be owned or operated by the United States federal government.” . . .

If passed by the town board, Deer Trail would charge $25 for drone hunting licenses, valid for one year. . . . 

Deer Trail resident, David Boyd, is also one of seven votes on the town board.

“Even if a tiny percentage of people get online (for a) drone license, that’s cool. That’s a lot of money to a small town like us,”said Boyd. “Could be known for it as well, which probably might be a mixed blessing, but what the heck?”

The board will consider the drone hunting ordinance on Aug. 6.

- 7News (Denver).

If shooting down drones operated by the federal government under color of law and at the behest of a duly constituted government doesn't constitute levying war against the United States, what does?  Indeed, simply voting to pass such an ordinance could constitute a declaration of war on the United States and hence an act of treason.  And, I know of no precedent that affords immunity from prosecution to acts of treason proclaimed in an official capacity.  This was certainly not believed to be the rule during Reconstruction, immediately after the U.S. Civil War.

The fact that anyone would even consider such a clearly illegal ordinance is an example of what I call the sovereignty of the group.  Deliberative bodies with more than about three members tend not to be very reliable at conforming themselves to external constraints on their actions and the larger the deliberative body is, the less reliably it does so.

From a practical perspective, the question is how to undermine the legitimacy of this kind of activity that is meant as much in jest and as a symbolic act, without spurring sympathy from like minded people.  The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, has issued a statement making clear that this law is unconstitutional on its face.  Even if a treason prosecution were authorized by law, for example, it might not make sense to bring one without far more negotiation and opportunity for Deer Run to back down.

Off Stage

One of the important insights one gets from living in the age of the Internet and niche media is that you because you don't hear about something on major television network news feeds and the front pages of major daily newspapers is that there is a lot of news going on in the world that never reaches us. 

There are Kurdish rebels fighting a low level (and sometimes quite hot) insurgency against the Turkish government in a story that develops in fine detail every day to which we are oblivious.  Soccer matches that catch the world's attention escape our view (Spain lost the latest major competition after a long string of victories).  The long running parallel stories of the evolution of Evangelical Christianity as driving forces for social change in Latin America and Africa pass almost unnoticed.  We are almost oblivious to a long running Sahel war in which Muslims from the arid north are radicalized and pressured to encroach on Christians and animists to the South as the Sahara desert grows and imperils their way of life.  We don't see the daily parade of evening news crimes in places like Sweden and England and France that fuel anti-immigrant rage, just the over the top outbursts of misguided reactions to it.  We aren't immersed in the zeitgeist of a Japan where a huge share of young adult women have chosen careers and consciously decided that husband's and children aren't worth the losing those careers and the wealth and freedom that come with them, or the angst of a generation of college graduates without the good job prospects that their parents had.  We have a hard to even believing that it is possible to live lives as peaceful, tolerant and secure as those of our neighbors in Canada - good news isn't news.

Finding alternative sources of news, and becoming aware of what the core media isn't covering, can allow us to become aware of the full spectrum of what's going on at home and abroad.  These source have the potential to make a pretty average middle class American more aware of coming major trends in the world than the CIA and the President's top advisors.

The Great Adjustment

What big idea can sum up a whole host of the trends that are at work in our daily lives?

One way to sum it up is that we are in the midst of the "Great Adjustment."  We are in the thick of forming a new culture that is adapting to new technologies and new economic realities, to the "Post-Modern" world. 

Examples

The notion is easiest to explain with examples.

* We experienced a huge change in how we reproduce in the 1960s and 1970s with the advent of a variety of new contraceptive methods and the legalization of abortion.  The sexual revolution followed, but it was followed with a sort of counter-revolution of concern about date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, STDs, teen pregnancy, child sexual abuse and pornography, and human trafficing.  A bit later, women who had used these technologies and reacted to these new attitudes by postponing child bearing decided they wanted children and have turned to assisted reproduction technologies to have children late in life.  Often this has had the side effect of creating affluent older mothers of young twins or triplets or higher order multiples.

Reliable contraception has also made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for men and women to have long term sexual relationships, within or outside marriage, without a realistic possibility of having children together before deciding to have children together (or not).

It has similarly made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for women to decide to focus on higher education and careers for long periods of time, even their entire lives, without commiting to sexual abstinance or being lesbians.  Likewise, it has become much easier for women to have just one, two or three children and then to stop having more children and become employed full time later in life as the children get older.

Where are we now?  We are at the tail end of making a permanent, at least for the indefinite future until something changes, adjustment to these realities by incorporating effective ways of managing them into to basic script of our culture.

Pessimists bemoan the end of traditional culture as we head to hell in a handbasket.  They are half right.  Traditional culture is dying.  But, we aren't heading to hell.  Instead, we are heading to a new post-modern cultural synthesis that is going to become the new traditional culture, possible for centuries or even thousands of years to come.

* Since the 1970s, our economy has slowly, but surely shifted from valuing labor to valuing intelligence.  The economy has always valued both and still does.  But, the economic premium that smart people can obtain relative to equally hard working, decent, not stupid people has surged immensely.  The former, who make up perhaps 20% of the workforce, have received perhaps 80% of the last four decades of economic growth.  The latter, who make up perhaps 80% of the workforce, have received perhaps 20% of the last four decades of economic growth.  The upper middle class has grown more affluent at a rate perhaps sixteen times that of the social class rungs below them over the last forty years.

Social class divisions have hardened.  After about a half a century in which servants disappeared from economic life and everyone was expected to deal with their own household needs, the older scheme in which there is a reasonably large class of people who have servants in some form or another has started to re-emerge.

The middle class has shrunk, losing "market share" to both the working class and the upper middle class.  We are on the verge of seeing a meaningful and potentially long term redrawing of the social class system.

* For most of human history, the fundamental issue was simply getting enough calories.  The first big change came in the Neolithic revolution when modern humans domesticated plants and animals, making possible herding and farming, and not long after that in many cultures, developed lactose tolerance, making it possible for adults to digest cow's milk.  Yet, even with herding and farming, annual periods of fasting driven by the food production cycle of the seasons and the limited means of perserving food, were the norm.  The developed world standard in which almost no one wants for food in their entire lives and diets have almost no connection to the season is recent indeed.

We have also, for most of human history, needed for more physical activity to sustain daily life.

Following old norms and ill advised changes in those old norms (e.g. the switch from butter to margarine, which substituted saturated fats for equally unhealthy or worse transfats), unhealthy obesity has surged.  So, we are in the process of changing the food ways of our culture in a way better adapted to the new realities.

* For roughly a century, we have enjoyed an economy fueled by oil obtained easily and cheaply from oil wells.  This has revolutionized transporation, urban design, and a whole host of other aspects of how we organize the global economy.  This era is winding down.  With it, conserving energy becomes more important, more compact land use becomes more attractive, public transit's desirability relative to private automobiles increases, and alternatives with their own demands on our culture emerge.

Oil use has already almost entirely ceased in electricity generation and has dramatically declined in industrial uses and home heating.  Very active efforts are underway to find transportation alternatives and alternatives for agricultural fertilizers and chemicals that are less dependent upon petroleum.

As oil becomes more scarce, organic foods will become more attractive, not because the are healtier or more environmentally friendly than non-organic foods, but because they will become less expensive than non-organic foods because petroleum is a less important factor of production for organic foods than for non-organic ones and petroleum will grow more expensive.

Land use has already seen a period in which the affluent are returning to central cities from the suburbs.

Analysis

The examples above aren't exhaustive or even particularly well explained.  But, they help illustrate what I mean when I say that we are in the midst of the Great Adjustment.

Technology, demographic change, long term shifts in natural resource availability, global warming and more have made and are continuing to make irreversible changes in the enviroment within which people find themselves and in order to adapt better to these changes, our culture is being remade in a manner that is better suited to this new world order.

The name of the game is to determine what the new synthesis the results in the Great Adjustment will look like.

Education and Unemployment

Is Cyclical Unemployment Mostly A Function Of An Underskilled Work Force?

It is widely known and irrefutable that unemployment is higher among those who have less education. Does it follow that an insufficiently educated rank and file labor force is an important cause of unemployment rates overall? I'm not sure that this follows.

The vexing point is education is to a great extent a way for employers in the economy to sort the workforce. Often, an employer will prefer an employee with more education, on the grounds that it is an indicator of greater general purpose workplace fitness, even when nothing learned during the course of that education is relevant to the job.

To the extent that education is used by employers, on average, as a sorting tool, we expect education to reduce unemployment simply because employers in an employer's market will prefer to hire more educated workers and the lay off less educated workers.

If formal education was the secret to employment, one would expect low education immigrant populations to have the highest unemployment rates, but that isn't the case. The highest unemployment rates are found in native born people with poor educations, not immigrant populations where the relationship between the kind of people sorted into reasonable levels of education in the U.S. and the education levels obtained in their home countries are quite different.

Also, the way that unemployment is defined masks a related problem in more educated workers, which is underemployment. For example, large law firms laid off about 12,000 lawyers in 2009, all of whom had graduate educations and many of whom had spent years on the job developing sophisticated specialty practices. When the market no longer needed lawyers, many of these laid off lawyers would still be able to carry out white collar jobs - perhaps as video store assistant managers, or self-employed divorce lawyers with small case loads, or substitute teachers, and others might decide that this is the time for them to leave the workforce and get more education or have children. But, a measure that looks only at unemployment would greatly understate the economic impact of the lawyer layoffs on lawyers and conclude based upon the low unemployment rates for lawyers that a legal education was somethign that the economy greatly valued in 2009.

While there are some "unemployable" people in the economy, this isn't what is going on when the nation experiences high levels of unemployment in the ordinary course of the business cycle. The vast majority of the people who are unemployed on the day that I write this post (when the unemployment rate nationally is about 9%), have been gainfully employed in a functional way within the last three years, or have been functional participants in educational institutions within the last three years. They don't have jobs not because they are incapable of doing jobs, but because their efforts at their old jobs, while competent, were being directed towards doing things that the economy didn't need, like building more houses in Florida and California and Nevada and providing for the economic needs of people who were doing so. The people who are unemployed during a period of business cycle driven high unemployment are more functional and more skilled unemployed people than those in any other part of the business cycle.

Job Creation As A Function Of Elite Skill Sets

While at the individual level, education of the rank and file workforce is an asset, at the macroeconomic level, it may be that the group whose education matters most is not the education of the ordinary worker, but the education of the economy's elites.

The idea is motivated mostly by two things.

First, my view that unemployment is fundamentally a failure of entrapreneurship. It happens when there is a shortage of executed ideas to find worthwhile things for idle workers to do. The vast majority of the labor force isn't in the business of creating jobs, it is in the business of doing jobs. But, an entrapreneurial elite does create jobs and unemployment is a product of their failure to meet the challenges they face at a certain moment in the economy. Unemployment is about a failure to mobilize ideal resources. There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy, and there are very few people whose talents can't be put to productive use.

The problem is not that they were doing a poor job at their old jobs, or that they are unqualified to do whatever new job might be created in the near future, but that an entrapreneurial elite has failed to figure out profitable things for them to do.

Car companies don't lose market share and have to lay off the employees whose jobs are lost because of declining market share (as opposed to offshoring) because the employees have collectively done a bad job of building cars. They lose market share because the design engineers, quality control engineers, marketing campaign managers, and senior executives in the company have failed to do their jobs as well as their counterparts in competing firms. When American automobile companies lay off workers and shutter factories at the same time that foreign automobile companies are hiring workers and opening factories in the United States, it is poor leadership by elites in the American automobile companies that is killing the jobs, not an uneducated workforce or excessive regulation or anything else of the kind.

Unemployment happens because the lassiez faire economy has become disorganized.

Second, it is motivated mostly by anecdotal evidence. Good management, leadership even, and a clear vision of how some job creating or economy enhancing institution is works, can have immense effects. Some of the examples that come to mind follow.

* Consider, Tumaini University. It is a private college in Tanzania sponsored by the Lutheran Church (the first private college in Tanzania), which some of my relatives played a significant part in establishing. The lay missionaries that helped build this institution that educates thousands of Tanzanians and employs many people received some outside funding, but the real asset that the church brought to the project was leadership, organization and expertise. Students made their own bricks and helped build college buildings with their own hands (something not so different from the early days of my alma mater, Oberlin College, when it earned its "Learning and Labor" motto starting in the 1830s). Vibrant local congregations provided a great deal of the resources of money and labor to make it work. But, those resources couldn't be put to work until someone who knew how a private university was supposed to work and knew what was involved in managing a long, complex project through all the steps necessary to get from here to there, knew when outside guidance was needed and where to get it, and knew how to establish an organizational culture that was free of corruption in the university's administration came along to guide and crystalize those resources into a large and worthwhile undertaking. A very small number of individuals with those talents and a very modest amount of funding and materials, made possible a big project that will educated large numbers of people for decades or centuries and create countless jobs, both directly, and indirectly through jobs created by graduates who will learn both skills in the classroom, and will absorb through osmosis the way a large bureacratic private entity that runs smoothly works.

* Consider the Port of Haiti when it was run for a brief period by outside American contractors (probably Halliburton, but I could be mistaken). All the rank and file employees were the same. But, a very small managerial group who knew how to do that job and were free of the institutional culture of corruption that had reigned before they arrived dramatically increased the productivity and efficiency of the Port.

* I've seen the exceptional talents that entrapreneurs whom I've represented who take an idea from start up businesses to medium sized ventures that employ a dozen or more people exhibit. While something on the order of sixteen million people, about one in six members of the labor force, are self-employed, the percentage of those people who every managed to establish or run medium to large sized businesses that employ lots of people is very small. The vast majority of self-employed people employ only themselves and perhaps a few other people.

* Consider job creation in immigrant communities, where someone in a first wave of early immigrants develop a business model, perhaps Chinese restaurants or laundries, perhaps Mexican subcontracting firms, perhaps Korean wig shops, that works and then later waves of immigrants follow that model and create large numbers of jobs from the clear vision of how to make it work created by the founder. This isn't restricted to immigrant communities of course. For example, the California style burrito vendor and the expresso shop have both been widely imitated by others who created many jobs in the process.

* Consider the economic collapse that followed fast track land reform in Zimbabwe, because the newly installed farmers didn't know enough about how to carry on the agribusinesses that had previously been run by mostly white plantation style farmers:

Before 2000 land-owning farmers, mostly white, had large tracts of land and utilized economies of scale to raise capital, borrow money when necessary, and purchase modern mechanized farm equipment to increase productivity on their land. As the primary beneficiaries of the land reform were members of the Government and their families, despite the fact that most had no experience in running a farm, the drop in total farm output has been tremendous and has even produced starvation and famine, according to aid agencies. Mostly crops for export have suffered severely, e.g. Zimbabwe was the world's 6th largest producers of Tobacco in 2001. It produces nowadays less than 1/3 of the amount produced in 2000, the lowest amount in 50 years. Zimbabwe was once so rich in agricultural produce that it was dubbed the "bread basket" of Southern Africa, while it is now struggling to feed its own population. About 45 percent of the population is considered malnourished.

The problem is not that black Zimbabweans can't run productive farms. I would have done no better than any of the beneficiaries of land reform. The problem is that the people who were given land to farm didn't have the skill set at the time to do it. A small managerial elite did have those talents and that knowledge was one component necessary to create a productive agricultural system in Zimbabwe, and removing the elite before a new one had been trained, had led to the collapse of the entire system.

* Consider franchises and branch stores of successful retail and service businesses. Once on person establishes a working business model, many others follow on to implement that proven business model and they in turn hire may people for their local operations.

* One of the persistant tropes of fairy tales and fantasy, because it has a certain residual nugget of truth to it, is of a erstwhile prince or princess down on his or her luck turning a dismal home into a place worth living, or organizing a lot of local people into a mass movement that gets something done. Call it the "community organizing" of President Obama's youth, or pull this concept out of a handbook on how to run a counterinsurgency campaign, the idea is the same. Even "The Lord of the Flies" extols the immense impact of a cohesive group of people who can organize themselves. World War II POW Camp narratives relate the way that the British more swiftly self-organized and became a functioning whole relative to American POWs who had trouble reaching consensus around leadership and authority within their POW community.

* My strong suspicion is that one of the main reasons that the Islamic Empire swept most of the known world around 700 CE so quickly is that the new system it created organized communities that had previously been disorganized, and by doing so, made them more functional. Christianity in Africa, mostly off the radar screen of American journalists, is doing something very similar today.

* One of the classic ways to end employment is to start a war. This works for two reasons. First, it creates a vision with all sorts of worthwhile things that need to be done. Second, it creates an end that is declared by fiat to be worthwhile.

* The habit of fitting workers to worthwhile tasks that the military develops can carry over into peacetime. This habit probably plays a large part in the pivotal role played by militaries in undeveloped economies from Egypt to China in the non-military economy.

* As noted in a biography of Dan Quayle, who made job training legislation his signature issue in Congress before he was tapped to be Vice President, no job training program ever implimented by Congress has worked very well. This makes a great deal of sense if entrapreneurial job creation failures by that elite, rather than a lack of job skills in the labor force, is the main culprit in unemployment.

* This fits the heuristics about idea exchange that are used to explain why economic productivity is exponentially related to urban population scale, and why some communities that are open to new ideas (like Boulder and San Francisco) over perform other communities given their scale. Richard Florida's work on localized economic development leads to similar conclusions. Idea exchange among elites in large, perhaps shallow networks is critical to economic growth. Economic growth happens better in communities where relationship networks look more like Facebook networks and less like tight knit, high social capital villages of the kind identified by Putnam.

* Consider that most of the most obvious things that separate Third World living from life in the developed world are carried out in the United States by non-partisan local government officials according to best practices that are mostly so uncontroversial that they never become a subject of political debate in the United States: good water and sewer services, regular trash collection, paved local roads, traffic laws that are routinely followed, widespread K-12 education, building codes enforced by non-corrupt building inspectors, property and sales taxes that are collected by non-corrupt local officials, police forces that are mostly not engaged in any political conspiracy more grand than to arrest criminals and maintain order. Indeed, real estate developers routinely put together new communities in "virgin territory" on these same principles every day and there are tens of thousand of professional city managers in the country (as well as many amateur local elected officials) who make them run smoothly. Many of the residents of these communities aren't exceptional in any way, and indeed, many of the elected officals charged with running these communities wouldn't know how to run them, but do know that one hires a city manager and that it gets done. The clear vision of the people establishing these municipal services held by a very small elite reproduces a modern functioning version of American society in first world style.

* Governor Hickenlooper, like most Governors interested in economic development, has rightly focused his short term job creation efforts on tapping the skills of highly talented retired or semi-retired corporate managers in Colorado who have created jobs before and know how to do it and are interested in contributing to the economy of their new home state. His intuition is right, because the highly networked, highly skilled people who make connections that other people failed to, in ideas and in people, are the ones who create most jobs. Jobs need boosters and entrapreneurs to be created.

Job creation is the process of finding something worthwhile that people in the labor force can do and then repeating it rapidly until it stops working. The people up come up with those business models create vast numbers of jobs, many of which they will never receive credit for creating. A few good ideas can create thousand or even hundreds of thosuands of jobs.

The skill set involved in creating these jobs is only partially academic. Even business school, either at the undergraduate level or the MBA level, doesn't fully capture what is necessary to be a prolific job creator. It also takes large personal networks, strong people skills, and the mix of skill and good fortune needed to identify ways to monetize worthwhile things that can be done with available labor (I say monetize rather than finance, because borrowing money or raising capital is a distinct issue from development a business model that turns meaningful work into business revenue.) And, more than any of these things, it takes a clear vision of what needs to be done that is true. A clear, valid vision of a way to make an enterprise work is more important than anything else in creating jobs.

Implications

One key implication of a theory of unemployment that focuses on the skill sets of entrapreneurs rather than the skill sets of rank and file workers, is that it dramatically shifts the natural conclusions about what kind of educational efforts are necessary to reduce unemployment. If a failure to perform on the part of elite is the problem, then doing a better job of providing them with what they need to make the economy thrive and create jobs matters more than training for rank and file members of the labor force, particularly those rank and file members of the labor force who were perfectly functional employees before an economic downturn hit.

There may indeed be individual skill gaps, but this is probably a fairly small part of the problem -- functional employees in one job setting can usually work at a job of comparable responsibility in another job setting in a different industry with only modest on the job training. There may be some technical skills that are in short supply, but my sense is that this is rarely the big bottleneck. Often, when there is a shortage of properly licensed and certified workers, the problem is more one of loosening barriers to entry so that people who can actually do the work are allowed to do so than a lack of actual ability. Similarly, in the tech boom the computer industry routinely hired people with the right computer skills before they graduated from college, because the demand was so great, even though jobs of that level of sophistication are usually reserved for college graduates in sectors of the economy that aren't growing so fast.

Another implication is that the biggest part of a government response to unemployment may be to inject organization into the economy by finding worthwhile things for unemployed people to do until the private sector can come up with something better. No government worth its salt can't find something it wouldn't like to do, and since it has to pay the unemployed something whether they work or not (not only unemployment benefits but a wide variety of other benefits), why shouldn't it use those resources to directly hire people to do things that are worth doing? As long as the pay is not so high in "make work" jobs that it drives up labor prices to high for when the private sector can find work to do, this shouldn't harm a recovery and prevents waste caused by a massively idle labor force.

A third implication of this analysis is that is greatly recasts the role of immigration in employment. A lot of immigration rather than filling some fixed quanity of jobs in the economy, creates jobs by bringing in entrapreneurial individuals who know how to creat jobs. In times of cyclical downturns in employment it makes particular sense to engage in an active policy of brain drain calculated to bring elite potential job creators to the U.S., rather than closing the doors on the grounds that the U.S. needs to reserve jobs for its own workers. Jobs are created by exceptional individuals, and people who are willing to cast aside the culture and world they grew up in, in order to make a better economic life for themselves disproportionately have the drive and visions that it takes to create jobs, and will tend to return home discouraged if they don't.

Unanswered Questions

This view of unemployment comes with unanswered questions. Why do entrapreneurs fail to come up with worthwhile things to do that they can monetize when the economy goes into recession? What are they missing? How can you measure that failure? What distinguishes someone who is capable of prolifically creating jobs from someone who is capable of filling a job competently but not likely to create one? What kind of stimulus fosters more connection making and creates a better climate for implementing entrapreneurial visions? How do you get people to change gears? Can economic indicators better tailored to capture this critical job creating component of the economy help us better understand unemployment?

Still, you can't get the right answers until you ask the right questions, and I am convinced that most people thinking about the issue of unemployment in politics and mainstream economics and the media are not asking the right questions.

Historic Moments

Conventional political science exams questions like regime change and legislative change primarily as domestic events with domestic causes. But, this model doesn't do a good job of capturing what is going on in either process.

Historic Moments

One of the defining features of regime change, and of most notable (and many not so notable) legislative policy changes, is that neither happens in a vacuum. While political science likes to neatly divide itself into foreign affairs and domestic politics, the reality is that domestic politics is generally strongly influenced by regional context. These kinds of changes happen in waves at historic moments.

Moments of Regime Change and International Domestic Policy Change

We did not see an isolated dictator case of a dictator being replaced in Tunisia. We saw one man's suicide in Tunisia over bureaucratic hassles in a dictatorship that denied him a livelihood set of a public uprising region wide that has produced a change of regime in Tunisia after decades of dictatorship, a change of cabinet in Egypt accompanied by a promise of the existing dictator to depart in the fall and a promise that his son will not seek to replace him, a promise in Yemen to hold elections soon in which the current leaders will not seek re-election, the sacking of Jordan's cabinet, a promise of prompt local elections in the Palestinian Authority, and the possibility of further tumult in Syria and Sudan.

We did not see an isolated change in government in the Soviet Union. We the non-Russian Republics in the Soviet Union granted independence, the dismantling of Yugoslavia, and the abandonment of a Soviet Communist political and economic system to a greater or lesser degree by every Warsaw Pact country, and every successor nation of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The Colonial powers of Europe did not one by one decide to grant independence to their colonies. They did so en masse in the years around 1960, granting independence to dozens of newly independent nations all at once.

In Post-War Western Europe, each nation did not decide in a vacuum what kind of regime they would create. Essentially every regime that had been interrupted by World War II in Western Europe created a multi-party parliamentary system, reinstated a civil law judicial system, renounced the death penalty, developed political parties dominated by a Social Democratic party on the left and a Christian Democratic party on the right, and put in place a comprehensive social welfare system supported by fairly high taxes with payroll taxes and value added taxes constituting a fairly large share of the total tax burden.

In World War I, a single assassination in Serbia sparked a bloody world war. The Russian revolution in its wake rapidly spread Soviet Communist to the whole of Eastern Europe.

The process by which Latin American nations secured their independence and put in place republics was so similar from nation to nation and involved a wave of change so clearly linked in time that one studies of the "Latin American Wars For Independence" when one studies the region historically, rather than trying to understand any one of them independently.

Italy and Germany came into being as democratic states, and democracy took hold for good in France in the 1870s.

Democratic revolutions hit almost every monarchy in Europe in 1848.

Moments of Subnational Political Innovation

State constitutions change in much the same way. One year, no state has a prohibition on dueling in its state constitution. Half a decade later, they are widespread. One year, no state has merit appointment of judges. A decade later, the Missouri plan for merit based judicial appointments subject to retention elections is widespread. One year, no state grants women the right to vote. A decade later, women's suffrage is the norm.

* Legislative Innovation

You see the same thing in legislation in state legislatures in the United States, even on matters where federal government policy doesn't apply. California passed no fault divorce and it swept the nation in a few years. Pre-trial release programs that allowed recognizance release of carefully screened defendants awaiting trial went from an experiment to the national norm in less than a decade. Dozens of states passed smoker's rights bills in a few years. The original Uniform Commercial Code was adopted by a large share of all states in a short time period and that area of law has continued to be guided by Uniform Law Commissioners ever since, as have the areas of partnership law and a number of other "uncontroversial" areas of private law. All but a handful of states adopted court rules based on the federal rules of civil procedure in short order, and likewise codified state ethics rules for lawyers based on a bar association model in one big sweep. Most states adopted laws providing for condominiums in about half a decade. Gay marriage and civil union laws have rapidly swept the nation, when less than a decade ago there wasn't even one. States put in place public school systems and structured the financing of state institutions of higher education all at about the same times in about the same ways, and followed suit by consolidating public school systems at the same time decades later. The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was done at the state level but happened mostly within the span of a few years without any national guidance. The replacement of orphanages with foster care happened in a similarly sweeping movement in a short period of time.

Worker's compensation laws, minimum wage and hour laws, child labor laws, local "dry laws," married women with property acts, heart balm acts, and laws regulating union-management relations swept state legislatures in very similar forms in the Progressive era. Local zoning laws that were very similar in structure and content were enacted in almost every major (and minor) city in the nation in a small number of years.

A contagion model of innovation dispersal better explains most legislative policy change and regime changes than a conventional account of purely domestic struggles between political factions in individual states or even in individual countries in a region.

* Judicial Innovation

Courts are every bit as prone to waves of innovation as legislatures and indeed, are sensitive to both legislative and judicial trends. A court decision in one state that there is a constitutional right to gay marriage or civil unions produces legislative action in another, and visa versa. The shift to court rules based on the federal rules of civil procedure was adopted legislatively in some places, and by judicial rule in others.

These waves are not confined to areas of the law where there is an arguable common federal constitutional basis for the requirement, and this is justified by the doctrine of persuasive common law authority. Thus, for example, strict product liability in tort, once adopted in California by the California Supreme Court, rapidly became the law of the land in almost every state. A cause of action for unjust enrichment, which was an obscure, mostly European legal concept until the critical moment, rapidly became a standard part of every commercial lawyer's arsenal of causes of action.

Moments Of Economic Change

Economists tend to be more conscious of this than political scientists, although the economists who recognize that economic change is follows a path dependent, evolutionary contagion model of change than acting like a thermodynamic system that is perturbed around an immutable natural equilibrium are still in the minority.

An innovation like franchising or "big box stores" comes along, and, in a decade of two, they are the dominant means by which retail sales are conducted. An innovation like subprime mortgage financing goes from being a trivial part of the mortgage finance industry to an immensely rapidly growing significant part of the whole over a decade and the vanishes almost entirely from the economic landscape in a year or two. A deregulated telephone industry engages in an intense marketing effort for long distance plans and phone service features like caller ID for less than a decade then suddenly starts almost giving long distance services and phone features away and launches into a competition to cell broadband access and mobile phone packages.

Economic collapses tend to spread even more rapidly than the spread of new economic models. The steel industry in the United States went under in the blink of an eye. The textile industry collapsed almost as fast. Airline bankruptcies have happened in waves. Travel agencies were culled in a couple of fell sweeps. Free standing investment banks organized as such disappeared from the economy in a matter of months, despite the fact that many of these firms had been around for more than a century. It took about sixteen years for the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis to reach its peak and only about three years for housing prices to collapse, with most of that devaluation happening in the first year.

There have been gradual, long term shifts in the economy, like the slow decline of the private sector labor union over about four decades, or the shrinking share of agriculture as a percentage of the labor force. But, if anything, these incremental charges are the exception, rather than the norm, and even these gradual changes conceal more dramatic shifts in particular industries and subindustries, and in particular regions.

Outlines of the Contagion Model Of Legal Innovation

What does a contagion model of political, economic and social change look like?

Political, Economic and Social Change Generally Happens In Sweeping Moments

Most of history, by which I mean political, economic and social change, happens not in gradual, uncoupled rational change by individual governments or businesses, but in sweeping historic moments that change the whole landscape in a flash like a disease outbreak, in a way that is path dependent and evolutionary in character.

Waves Of Legal Innovation Are Not Driven Primarily By Formal Legal Mandates

This happens even if there are no political or legal institutions with any formal authority to compel this to happen, and even if the changes adopted in one place have little spill over effects. The United States Constitution was very carefully drafted to make it possible for different states to have different suffrage rules without changing the federal balance of power. Yet, women's suffrage spread rapidly none the less and was the law in almost every state by the time that the 19th Amendment made it mandatory in federal elections, and while the U.S. Constitution does not expressly guarantee women the right to vote in state elections, few people doubt that the 14th Amendment equal protection clause (which clearly did not compel women's suffrage in practice at the time that it was adopted) would be held to compel states to give women the right to vote today.

It is the power of the idea that seems like a good one in its context, once it is cast in the spotlight communicated to the right outsiders, and not outside compulsion, that drives waves of innovation.

Sometimes there are coordinating forces. Federal legislation, or international treaties, or U.S. Supreme Court rulings may force state or national governments to follow a larger trend. But, as often as not, these compulsions are addressed to recalcitrant holdouts from trends that have already taken hold as they are influential in bringing about the bulk of the trend. By the time that Jim Crow laws were dismantled in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, apartheid laws had vanished from most of the world already -- and South Africa was for decades, the only country in the world that had to be compelled by international pressure to dismantle its apartheid system until it eventually submitted. Federal laws governing union-management relations were enacted only after they had become widespread at the state level. The European human rights treaty that banned the death penalty in member nations was adopted only after almost every nation in Europe had already done so.

Waves Of Change Have A Trigger

A wave of political, legal or cultural change generally has a clear identifiable trigger that starts it, focusing the attention of people with the power to act upon it on an idea or possiblity or reality.

The current uprisings in the Arab world were triggered by the Jasmine Revolution which in turn was triggered by the self-immolation of a particular young man in Tunisia. The fall of the Soviet system began when Mikhail Gorbachev started to implement Perestroika in late 1988.

The "no fault" divorce wave of legal innovation was triggered by California's enactment of its "no fault" divorce law. Women's suffrage didn't take off until Wyoming, which had adopted women's suffrage as a territory in 1869, became a state in 1890 (and was followed by Colorado in 1893 and many other states soon afterwards).

The Great Recession was triggered by a short sequence of economic events in the fall of 2007. The Great Deprssion was triggered by the stock market crash of 1929.

A First Innovator Is Often Not The Trigger For A Wave Of Change

Clearly, it does not mean that the first place to innovate will set off a wave of change. Indeed, much of the time, the first innovator or two will stand alone for decades or more before the wave of change takes hold. California clearly set off the "no fault" divorce legislative wave, but other states had no fault divorce for decades before it adopted it. India was granted independence from colonial rule more than a decade before decolonialization became the norm and a decade and a half before it reached its 1960 peak. Wyoming had had an obscure limited liability company law on the books for many years before changing tax regulations caused this kind of company to become one of the primary means of organization for closely held businesses in the United States. The United States, France, Switzerland and Iceland were the only nations to have had republican forms of government for almost a century before democracy became the norm in Europe.

Indeed, a well proven test case may be important in making widespread adoption of an innovation happen more smoothly when a wave of change takes hold. Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution would not have spread had demonstrators there been swiftly gunned down and failed to secure any change. The revolutions of 1848 in Europe would probably not have begun had France and the United States not established that Republican government might be a viable possibility decades earlier.

Waves Of Change Can Only Be Triggered When the Time Is Right

Most of the time, the status quo prevails. Yesterday's dicatorship will almost always be tomorrow's dicatorship. Yesterday's fault based divorce law will remain on the books until the moment comes when no fault divorce sweeps the nation. Last year's housing prices will be a good predictor of this year's housing prices.

An single young man's suicide would not have triggered the Jasmine Revolution in 1985, when the latest dictator had been in office for only a few years, and the Soviet Union appeared to provide evidence that one party states could be powerful and economically successful. No fault divorce wasn't ripe to sweep the legislative landscape until lawyers and members of the same social class as legislators had become familiar with just how ugly and hypocritical the increasingly common incidence of fault based divorce had become, and would not have happened without the ferment caused by the sexual revolution at a cultural level. Limited liability companies weren't very attractive until they received a desirable tax treatment. The Financial Crisis that gave rise to the Great Recession wasn't possible until a housing price bubble had reached an unsustainable level, and the entire financial industsry was exposed to more housing default risk than it could easily bear.

Waves of Change Follow Long Periods of Inaction.

Awareness of the problem that will be addressed by the spread of innovation doesn't have to be front and center in the public discussion. Indeed, it may be that a wave of innovation is possible only in circumstances when a problem or imbalance is widely known to exist by everyone involved but is considered an off limits issue or an issue of secondary importance that is not publicly acknowledge by all but a fairly small group of activists.

When a problem is the subject to active public discussion as an important public issue that receives wide attention and is not "off the table," the status quo is less likely to fall so far out of balance that a new wave of innovation, other than any wave of innovation that is already being ridden and worked through at that very moment, can be triggered.

A seven year old regime isn't going to trigger an uprising unless it is very bad. A regional political climate in which most of the region has been governed by local strongmen for three decades of more will.

Political innovations like term limits may be important in securing political stability because they prevent incumbency from allowing the political leadership to grow stale and prevent incumbency from being used with full force to suppress other political views (perhaps even intraparty, rather than partisan opposition, views).

Waves Of Legal Change Are Often Incomplete

A wave of innovation also often does not completely run its course. While the vast majority of the world's colonies secured independence by the 1970s, a handful remained colonies into the last decade of the 20th century and a few colonies remain today. The United States was a hold out against international norms on slavery and apartheid and remains a hold out among developed nations on the question of the death penalty, which is uses more widely than any other developed nation. Cuba held onto a Soviet style communist regime despite the fact that all such regimes in Europe were replaced. Spain had a dictator long after the other nations of Western Europe had genuine multi-party democracies.

This is true at the subnational political level as well. Almost every major city in the United States adopted a zoning code, but Houston was a hold out. The move to replace the grand jury with a preliminary hearing as the main way of determining if probable cause existed to bring criminal charges swept the Western United States, but did not upset the constitutional entrenched rules of almost any of the Eastern states. New York State and California resisted the national trend to adopt state civil procedure rules modeled on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Nebraska uses a unicameral legislature notwithstanding the fact that every other state in the country has a bicameral one. Lousiana and Oregon permit non-unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials contrary to the rule of every other state.

Waves Of Legal Change Do Not Require Genuinely Superior Proposals

The hold outs from waves of innovation tend to disprove the theory that waves of innovation happen because the change that has swept across many jurisdictions actually has overwhelming superiority on the merits.

The differences in the criminal justice process between Oregon, which permits non-unanimous felony jury verdicts and Washington, which does not, is subtle. New York State's refusal to adopt civil procedure rules modeled on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure has not caused an exodus of business litigation from the state, despite the ability of businesses to agree to other forums. New York State's failure to adopt no fault divorce laws until a year ago did not prevent people from moving there or attract people to the state. Houston's land use patterns are not much different from those of other large Texas cities that have zoning codes (it has more multi-family housing in single family neighborhoods and a few more neighborhood convenience stores, but otherwise isn't much different). North Carolina has suffered few obvious ill effects from continuing to permit alienation of affection lawsuits that have been banned in almost every other state. Cuba's communist economic and political policies have not made it the poorest or more oppressed nation of Latin America. The places that remained colonies long after most of the world had decolonized, like Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands, are not obviously any worse off than those countries that gained their independence, indeed, on the whole, they are better off than their peers that gains independence sooner.

It is enough that a proposed legal change is widely believed to be superior. Indeed, even proposed legal changes that empirically proved after the fact to be clearly dysfunctional, like the adoption of Western style democratic systems and legal regimes in newly independent nations that were former European colonies, which led to long periods of one party states, dictatorships, or military regimes in short order in almost every place they were attempted the first time (and often the second and third time) that they were attempted, did not prevent legal changes from being rapidly adopted on a widespread basis.

Wave Of Legal Change Have "Natural Boundaries"

Legal and political innovations (and no doubt economic and cultural ones, as well) do not automatically sweep the entire world. They have an impact only on jurisdictions where changes elsewhere are viewed as relevant.

The impact of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia has spread to almost every other Arab state in region with a generally similar history. But, it shows no signs of extending to dictatorships in former Soviet Central Asia, and doesn't even seem to be spreading to dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia.

Chinese style communism had enough of a distinct identity of its own that it did not collapse when Soviet Style communism did.

Political innovations in Europe in the 19th century had little impact on most of Asia and Africa that were seen as different in kind than European nation-states, but did have an impact on North American and Latin American colonial states whose significantly European populations did see their situations as more parallel to those of Europe.

Western European nations in the post-World War II era have generally seen political and legal innovations in other Western European nations as relevant to them, but have generally been oblivious to political innovations in Eastern Europe, the Third World or the United States. Latin America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have paid more heed to innovations in Europe than in the rest of the world, with Latin America being particularly strongly influenced by Iberian political and legal development, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand being particularly strongly influenced by English political and legal innovation.

The United States, by and large, has borrowed relatively little from the rest of the world politically, legally or culturally considering the amount of information available to it from the rest of the world. For example, even innovations adopted everywhere else in the world, like the metric system, have only made modest inroads in the United States. Indeed, the general disregard that American policy makers have had for the rest of the world, and their tendency to focus heavily on federal rather than state and local politics for reasons explained by the national level of organization of academic scholarship, may explain the relatively insensitivity of American legal scholars and political scientists to the profound role of waves of legal and political innovation that is so obvious elsewhere.

Lousiana has resisted many legal innovations that are widespread in the rest of the United States because it sees itself as a civil law jurisdiction unlike the other 49 states in the Union, although this sense of exceptionality appears to be waning. Utah, similarly, is a place where political and legal innovations may arise despite not being found elsewhere, and may not spread very readily when Utah alone innovates, as its identity as a predominantly Mormon state limits the tendency of other states to follow its lead.

Political innovations like the realignment of Christian conservatives from the Democratic to Republican party have been profound in the Southern states where there was previously a dominant party system in which the Democratic party controlled everything and was the only viable political party, but have played out very differently in places that had a viable two party system before the Republicans adopted the Southern strategy.

To the extent to which jurisdictions are within the same "natural boundaries" and receive information from each other, they will strongly tend to follow the same course of political and legal innovation. But, places outside those natural boundaries will tend to follow courses of political and legal evolution independent of those within those boundaries.

"Natural boundaries" of Legal Innovation Aren't the Same In Both Directions.

The strength of the natural boundaries aren't necessarily the same in each direction and flow from historical ties and relatively scale. Japan, for example, to a much greater extent than any other nation in Asia, due to the lingering impacts of U.S. involvement in the post-World War II reconstruction of the nation, is influenced by the U.S. much more than other nations of Asia that tend to receive the U.S. influences that do impact them second hand through Japan.

For example, after U.S. occupation, the Japanese began to celebrate Valentine's Day, although in a different way than in the United States. In Japan, women express their romantic feelings for men on February 14 (generally with gifts of chocolate), but men reciprocate towards women romantically not on Valentine's Day but on "White Day" on March 14, and this modified Valentine's Day-White Day tradition has spread from Japan to South Korea, urbanized China and Taiwan (South Korea, in turn, had further innovated with "Black Day" on April 14, when singles who lacked Valentine's Day and White Day suitors commisserate together.) The Japanese have also adopted a version of the American criminal jury trial, baseball, a form of the American Thanksgiving celebration (in Japan they have KFC Chicken instead of the grand Turkey feast), Western clothing styles, American style toilets, and their own versions of the American comic book tradition.

But, Japanese political, legal and social innovations have had considerably less penetration into the American scene, and Japan, because it is considerably different from the U.S. has adapted rather than directly copied many of the innovations it has brought from the United States and Western nations generally. In the same time period, in contrast, South Korea, which sees Japan as within its national scope of relevance as a model, has heavily borrowed from the Japanese model in its laws, form of economic organization and culture.

Dominant Players More Strongly Resist Innovation From Others

It also seems to be the case that the more dominant a political and cultural unit is, the less prone it is to be influenced from contagions of innovation from elsewhere. New York, California and Texas are more comfortable being outliers that ignore legal and political innovations from outside their states than Connecticut, Washington State and Oklahoma. The United States was more comfortable ignoring innovations in the rest of the world than the nations like Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy.

The fact that Egypt could be so strongly influenced politically by developments in much smaller, but otherwise very similar Tunisia is a testiment to Egypt's lack of dominance in the region and its lack of a strongly distinct self-identity from its neighbors as a culture of its own as opposed to as a large generically Arab state, at this moment in history. Its unique identity has been swallowed in its understanding of itself by its regional identity, something that was not true in the ancient world, were it was a dominant player on the international scene that largely went its own way.