Reality
Within this piece on FACEBOOK that ran in the NY Times last week is the nugget for a larger examination:
Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” — the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity.
In addition to the political and economic sacred cows felled by recent economic events, technology now shifts its guns in the direction of social institutions once immune to change.
In the March, 2009 Atlantic Richard Florida suggests the economic malaise could mirror the collapse of the late 19th Century which lasted 23 years.
The historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has noted that in some respects, today’s crisis most closely resembles the “Long Depression,” which stretched, by one definition, from 1873 to 1896. It began as a banking crisis brought on by insolvent mortgages and complex financial instruments, and quickly spread to the real economy, leading to mass unemployment that reached 25 percent in New York.
This brings me to my observation of the lives of white middle-aged middle and upper middle-class friends in Albany, NY area. The structural re-alignment, for the first time in my memory, has forced those in my “homophily” to structurally realign how they live their lives. In China personal changes have lead to societal changes. The same may be on the way in New York and the USA. (Former NPR Beijing correspondent Rob Gifford in his book China Road suggests, and I’m paraphrasing here, that once you let a people decide what they want on top of their pizza it’s not a far stretch that they’ll eventually want to also decide who they want on top of their government.)
Friends who for years have played a key role in government now question in private conversation the adequacy of the structure of the state’s economy and its constitutional structure. New York State’s Constitution has not been seriously reconsidered since 1897 with a tweak in 1938. “What do you think about referendum?” was what was for dinner last night. “On a local level, we have it in our Municipal Home Rule Law,” I replied. “Where will we be economically in two years?” A reality-based structure is needed. But the problem is bigger than that, I reply. The economic upheaval has revealed fundamental deficiencies in America. Democracy requires democrats and critical thinkers, I answer. Diversity and innovation are America’s traditional strengths. CUT TO: those who are supposed to nurture those strengths.
At last week’s conference of social studies teachers and supervisors from across the state I had a glimpse of “the profession” – depression and dispassion; intellectual frustration; suffocated innovation; struggle with a corrupted, authoritarian form without regard for individual initiative. Exactly what I found under socialism in China: an intellectual class with an iron-rice bowl mentality who expect the government to provide job tenure, health insurance and an annual pay raise. What is the reality that these people teach in their classrooms? I mused aloud. My job at the social studies conference was to teach about the reality of China.
Back to dinner where the question of whether longer legislative terms opens the worm can, as it should. The reality-driven question is how can the relationship between the government and the governed be made legitimately representative? In China, responsibility for achieving that goal falls upon the shoulders of the party. Political empowerment will come from economic empowerment, but it’s a dream predicated upon education.
Here in Albany the talk is all about politics since that’s the local industry. But it’s economics on which the castle of a democratically-elected state government has been built. Would shifting power, now in the hands of a centralized legislative party, to an electorate-driven chamber bring us closer to economic reality? Or would it simply risk instability? The state budget and the upcoming fiscal cuts to come were, will be and had to be implemented from the top down. Same as in China: command economy. Difference is there people accept that. Perhaps it’s acceptance that I learned over six years and lectured about last week.
But back to narrowing that representative gap. To do it, I suggested, over dinner, one would take one house, most likely the Senate, and make its constituency ideological instead of population-driven. Make the entire state as a one-district unit like in Israel’s 120-member Knesset. Parties that want to win a seat in the Senate would field a list of candidates. The percentage of the vote would determine who on the list would gain a seat priority being given to those highest on the list. Voters would judge state-wide parties on their platform and their list. New York’s strength, diversity, would be amplified in its government. Bi-bicameralism in New York would have a utility, which it does not now, since both chambers are elected from population-driven districts.
But what about reality? That’s for people who can’t face drugs, I said. Learned that in college, I said, where they taught us to read the writing on the wall.