Canada and American Institutional Failure

How will the very real risk of institutional failure in the USA impact Canada?  Look for a surge of refugees heading north for safety, stability, protection, and a productive life.  How will Canada respond?

Matt, Alex Jones and others “sell tickets” through extreme statements to grab your attention. On the other hand, this writer believes we are risking “institutional failure,” a situation in which people lose confidence in the (not their) government. Then a vacuum opens; nobody knows for sure what steps into it? Germany had such a vacuum in the 1929-1933, because of the Wall Street vampires. Now fast forward to our time. The Wall Street vampires – and their political gangster allies in Washington – have created a $17 trillion debt, which they will fund with fake money. Enter financial collapse. Yes, we face unrest, civil war in the streets, and a police state response. The challenge now is to have reserves to get out of the way as best we can. We are like dogs that face an approaching attacker. We can fight or flight. This writer is in the flight mode, the safety mode, the keep your head down approach. We cannot save a system from destroying itself. The best we can do is avoid having the rubble fall on us. Meanwhile, we save our strength, our optimism, our talents for – yes – the future. Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction.” We cannot fix this. As my hero Peter F. Drucker taught, “Starve problems and feed opportunities.” Your love of the rural is one asset for staying safe that you have. Do not overlook it. Trust your instincts. In the end, it is better to put our Faith in God, not men. Paul

News from the Future from Toronto

News from the Future

World Future Society Conference 2012 Toronto

By Paul Rux, Ph.D.

Once a year, the World Future Society, the leading practice group for experts on discovering likely future trends, holds a three-day conference.  To it come 500-600 experts from all parts of the globe to share their foresights about what probably is coming down the “pipeline” to shape our futures.

As a Professional Member of the World Future Society, who has designed and teaches online courses about trend forecasting for doctoral students at Jones International University, this writer was eager to attend and “mine” the conference for “nuggets” about emerging trends likely to shape our future. I would like to “share the wealth” with you through quick summaries of some “nuggets of foresight” that “bubbled” to the forefront of discussion in various conference workshops in which I participated.

The first “nugget” comes from the one-day workshop on the future of education that “kicked off” the conference for me.   First, education is reaching a “fork in the road” between “learning,” what we do for ourselves, and “teaching,” what others (teachers) do to us.  Emerging learning technologies favor self-paced “learning” and promote a growing trend toward “teacher-less” education.  In effect, learning technologies can “automate” more and more learning processes.  What does this mean for school and college budgets in the future?  Online learning is just the “tip of the iceberg” of this trend.

A second “nugget” comes from the day-two workshop on the likely future of higher education.  Here is the “news from the future” about post-secondary education.  It faces a likely 10% loss of students yearly now because of the growing student loan and lack of jobs crises.  The question for us is:  “At a 10% loss of students yearly, in what kind of shape will post-secondary education be in five years?”  Likely the response from educators will be their standard “more” taxpayer funding.  The U.S. already has $1 trillion in unpaid student loans, 40% of which persons over age 60 owe!  At what point does this “bubble pop” and we start to embrace options like pay-as-you go apprenticeships for most.

A third “nugget” comes from the day-two workshop on policing.  It featured a panel of frontline policing trend forecasters from New York City (20 years service), Denver (14 years service), and Houston (12 years service).  Here in a “nutshell” is their “news from the future.”  We are facing a reset in policing.  The panelists called it “nurturing neighborhoods.”  It is code for do-it-yourself policing.  As budgets collapse at local, county, state, and national levels of government, police will not have the resources to protect us.  In effect, we are going to be on our own.  Justice is becoming “just us.”  Imagine.  The big shots in Washington have money for Wall Street “bankster” bailouts and bonuses, bombs and bullets in the Middle East, but they care and have nothing for the American people.  This is a sobering forecast.  The panelists are veterans; they know where cuts in police budgets are leading.  They forecast a growing trend toward “walled” and “surveillance” neighborhoods as one result.

A fourth “nugget” comes from the day-three workshop on economic development trends.  It dovetails with the day-two workshop on trend forecasts for policing.  As we move into the future, the greatest asset a community will have in the competition for jobs will be public safety – not tax rates, real estate, and taxpayer “give-away” loans and grants.  Nobody in his or her right minds, especially the “knowledge workers” who must drive the emerging economy of the future, wants to live where people get shot on the main streets, gangs beat people on the main streets and state fair grounds – without meaningful consequences.  Computer scientists can easily move from here to Waterloo, Ontario, the “Silicon Valley” of Canada where laws prohibit “concealed carry” of weapons.  If job growth depends on public safety, and common sense knows this, what does this say about our future?

Paul Rux, Ph.D. (Wisconsin-Madison) lives in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.  He has presented workshops at the Washington, D.C. conferences of the World Future Society and published in its journal, The Futurist.    Last year he was part of an online, global research group on the future of teaching trend forecasting for the European School of Business, Wiesbaden, Germany.   www.paulrux.net

Copyright 2012 by Paul Rux Associates, Inc.

    

What the Canadian 13% federal sales tax buys.

Evony, my wife just spent two weeks in Canada. On every sale there is an automatic 13% sales tax. federal. What does this buy? One, it buys health insurance for everybody; small businesses, large businesses too, do not have this as a cost. This probably is one of the reason why Toyota opened 400 jobs in the area where we were last week! It is also why GM invesed $1.5 billion in expanded production in Oshawa, Ontario, to the north of Toronto while we were there. It also pays all of the bills for the government of Canada, which is not in debt. Ours has over $17 trillion in debt, and this is rising. I will gladly pay the 13% tax in exchange for healthcare for all and no inflation of the currency because the government prints fake money to pay its debts, which is the case here. This inflation by fake money causes prices to rise on food, gas, clothing, etc. The middle and lower classes pay for this fake money through higher prices. The small business in Canada is farther ahead than here. The USA should learn from its neighbor to the North; Wall Street is making too much money the way it is here now to ever do something fair, sensible. Travel comparison is learning.

Pow Wows on the Future in Toronto

Geoff, thank you for the excellent expansion of Module 8 with Assignment 8.3. It really raises the final work product of the course to a hefty doctoral level. As I reviewed it, I kept thinking that, yes, it is challenging; on the other hand, I cannot imagine a student who completes this not taking personal (intrinsic) satisfaction with hitting such a high level of synthesis and professionalism. I really must thank you for providing this grand finale!

While we were in Toronto, my wife and I always, if they are home, visit with our dearest friends. He was in grad school at U of Toronto for his Ph.D. when I earned my M.A. there. We have remained loyal, lifelong friends. Here is the point. He is head of science at York University, students body of 66,000, in suburban Toronto. He has 10,000 students in his science department.

  Right now, they are revising the curricula to make it competitive as we move into the future. He was sharing with me how he is dealing with resistance to his concept of change. Wow, I was able to share the core nuggets of EDU782 with him to bolster him for the faculty meetings that he faced the next morning! Talk about field testing EDU782! I carefully underscored the core of EDU782 – be sure of your core values, your philosophy, before you go into the arena. Then stick to your philosophy, and you will rally others. He sees the emerging theme of Apps, although he does not call it this. He wants students to have a skill-based curriculum that will enable them to constantly learn, unlearn, relearn, etc. as the future emerges! He was in effect doing a future trend analysis big time right there, but he did not have the concept to sum it up. I provided it.

  I must share this because of how our private – the women were in the other room catching up – pow wow underscored the value of our work too.One, he validated the important of future studies, trend forecasting as crucial today.  Two, he validated the philosophical foundation for leadership in the emerging – going into the future – age. He is a scientist, so he did not have the management science language, conceptual framework to provide the succinct summaries that future studies can.

  The great part of it – besides having face-to-face time with a dear, old friend – was all of this happened as I was getting ready to attend the World Future Society conference that week in downtown Toronto. I am so very very pleased that JIU is embracing these best of the best practices that I have put forward for course development – futuring and philosophical foundations for leadership.

  Our students are ahead of the “game” because of the JIU capacity to innovate; your polishing of these courses with me speaks to your “strategic foresight,” to use a futuring term. Yes, I am so very pleased with our directions this year with course development.

 The World Future Society conference was stunning! I even received an invitation to the annual conference of the Future Studies Society in Azerbeijan! Yes, it was a global conference, literally. I look forward to the next steps. Paul

How does Plato apply to Canada today, its future?

Erik, as the late American philosopher Russell Kirk put it, we never learn anything new. We simply relearn. It seems each generation, some more than others, must relearn the lessons of reality. Today, your professor burdened his wife with an application of Plato's "cycles of government" from his classic study The Laws. Simply, Plato observed that self-control is always better than external controls. When people lose self-control because they abandon time-tested values, society reaches a point where it has a choice: collapse into anarchy and risk conquest, or restore order good and hard through a dictatorship. If we continue to unravel, degenerate, we risk reaching this fork in the road: collapse or dictatorship. Plato noted that external control is always of poorer quality than internal self-control. Sadly, the Macedonians conquered Greece shortly after Plato's death; Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, became the tutor of the future Alexander the Great! Aristotle "went with the flow" and accepted the end of his country's independence. Greece did not recover its independence until the 1800's almost 2,000 years later. It can happen. How does Plato's analysis help us to better understand present trends and where they may be taking us? Are we following his model, scenario?

Canada did not follow insane American deregulation of financial institutions

Canada, to its great credit, did not join the American stampede to deregulate financial institutions.  This is why the banks of Canada today are solid, not "zombie" American banks, which are "dead but still walking."  Sadly, the American people have not yet grasped they have "zombie" institutions.

Shaun, your humble servant here just read The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, a husband and wife team of historians, who are "giants" of 20th-century historiography. Their "Lessons" - published in 1968 - sums up what they learned about history and human behavior because of their 11-volume historical study of Western civilization that leads up to their "Lessons," the twelfth, final book in their definitive study of the history of Western civilization. Here is what the have observed. When government regulation of bad behavior is lax, non-existant, look for a growth in the emphasis in society on ethics and religions to fill this vacuum. Boomo, bango, bingo! This is exactly what has happend in the USA. We have stopped enforcing laws against economic terrorism; as a result, we have a renewed interest in ethics as a way to "fight back." It is amazing to see how acurate the Durants are with their assessment of human behaviors; trend forecasters would say, yes, their model is a valid, reliable way to test current trends today. Trend forecasting does utilize historical models as ways to test current trends and project probable, possible future scenarios. When "ethics" and religion do not do the job, we can look for a swing back to governmental reuglation, maybe even law enforcement and punishment of business vampires and their zombie political allies. Durants suggest this could be the pattern in the future, for it has been the pattern in the past.

Canada has water - lots of potable water for human use!

Carol, bravo! These reviews of your two website choices, Hudson and RAND, are very, very exciting! Thank you for your careful analysis of their resources for researchers. Your humble servant here had the chance to visit RAND once. He interviewed the person in charge of securing R&D funding for special projects at RAND. What was stunning was the persons, a woman, had a Ph.D. in civil engineering from UCLA, and she was the fundraiser for RAND! This is impressive - big time! Her board of advisors included then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. When she was not raising research funds for projects that offered potential but still had nobody to pay for contract research about them, she tracked the price of water - globally! RAND is already tracking trends in water as a resource - in detail, depth (pun)! This was in 1985! RAND was already conducting trend forecasts on the availability or lack of it for this basic human survival resource. We cannot drink oil. As I waited for my turn to get security clearance to go to her office, I observed the special Pentagon couriers coming into the building - with briefcases chained to their wrists! thank you for taking me back in time to a very exciting trend forecasting think tank. If you have a chance visit it. Catch the energy!