Digital Matters - Issue 38

There was a time when people looked to government as an incubator of social and economic change. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and Richard Nixon's wage and price controls were all sweeping governmental programs, driven by distinct political constituencies, that addressed serious societal problems.

Few people today look to government to do anything but maintain the truce of the status quo: You can have yours if I can have mine. Don't cut Social Security cost-of-living increases. Don't cut Mom's Medicare. Don't tax Internet transactions. Reappoint Alan Greenspan. Make sure that the FAA keeps the airline industry honest. America is so rich, every constituency gets bought off.

That's why U.S. politics has become so tedious and dull. There is no great clash of interests, since everyone gets something. And there is no great clash of ideas, since both parties believe in corporate democracy. We already know what Vice President Al Gore is going to say before he says it: If it's bad, it's a "risky scheme." We already know what the Republican response to Gore will be: "He's a hypocrite!" The argument takes place at the margins. Indeed, if you took part of Gore's stump speech and inserted it into George W. Bush's stump speech (or vice versa), you wouldn't really change the message of either candidate.

Tedious and dull politics is not a bad thing. Better the 1950s, with its Organization Man, nearly full employment, and Chuck Yeager, than the 1930s, with its Great Depression, bread lines, dust bowls, and Nazis goose-stepping into Czechoslovakia. Since the end of the Cold War, American politics has been tepid and uninteresting, but that's a good thing -- because great politics usually occurs only in times of great challenge.

We are nearing the end of tedious, dull, and small politics. The new economy will soon transform American politics just as radically as it has transformed American business.

Eventually, it will engage the country and most of the developed world in a profound discussion about the rights of individuals, the rights of the majority, the rights of nations, the right to life, and the moral obligations of nations and of citizens in an evermore interdependent world. Many issues will drive this debate, but the most important ones will be converging digital technologies, genomics, robotics, nano-technologies, and molecular electronics. The impact of converging digital technologies has already been felt in the United States: It has given rise to a new constituency of voters -- one that Fast Company, a few years back, dubbed Free Agent Nation.

Free agents don't work for companies, and they don't have careers per se. They work in teams and on projects. They need portable health and dental benefits, portable pensions, and an easier-to-use tax code, as well as rules and regulations that protect them from intellectual piracy and fraud. The Web is their interstate-highway system, and they need the infrastructure up and running -- yesterday.

Free Agent Nation is more than 20 million members strong. Free agents have children -- members of the echo boom, which is larger than the baby boom -- and those echo boomers are not being educated in even the most basic fundamentals of English, math, and science. If you think that I'm exaggerating, check out the proficiency scores of students in the Los Angeles or New York public-school systems. Those scores are a national disgrace.

The new economy places a premium on smart capabilities, on the ability to manage and process information. And it will not be denied. It needs people to do the work, to get the job done -- to function. It will soon assault the public-school system in America -- literally tearing it out of the claws of the teachers' unions and the education establishment, and requiring higher academic standards, better teachers, and more-complex thinking. This process has already begun with the vouchers movement and the creation of charter schools. But soon there will be an explosion in the areas of Internet homeschooling, Internet colleges, Internet night schools, and Internet training centers. In all likelihood, companies will actually pay students to participate in these new ventures, so desperate are they for high-quality employees.

The next step in the policy logic: Because there is a huge gap in the population between baby boomers and echo boomers, the new economy will require the relaxation of immigration rules and regulations in order to accommodate qualified workers who can help make new-economy companies competitive. Immigrants will also be needed to help pay for the baby boomers' Social Security and Medicare. If immigration laws are not relaxed, the new economy will move elsewhere: The first country that explicitly sets itself up as a new-economy, borderless nation will attract hundreds of thousands of the world's most able workers. One consequence of an America with wide-open borders: Third-party politics of the Ross Perot kind will intensify over time.