Post No. 185: There are 4,389 Reasons the U.S. Economy is Suffering; Let’s Focus on the Top 28

© 2012, the Institute for Applied Common Sense

According to some, those of us who are Baby Boomers are far better "educated" and "more sophisticated" than our parents. However, our parents have or had far more "sumpthin’." To this day, the 92 yr old Father of one of our Fellows speaks of the importance of understanding the "times," and "timing," concepts which are lost on today’s politicians, who reduce everything to a direct, cause and effect formula.

When the Logistician was with us, he used to tell of his days handling medical products litigation where people died in hospitals or ended up as vegetables. What always fascinated him was that there was rarely just one thing that went wrong. It was more likely that 9 or 10 things went astray at the same time.

All muck-ups in life (and those of complex, dynamic organizations) are attributable to a "confluence of events or factors." The same applies to all successes. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, refers to it as "serendipity."

Earlier today, while surfing the Twittersphere, we encountered a lady who complained about the failure of some to “follow the Constitution.” She noted that if they kept a copy in their pockets, they might do a better job of serving US interests. She kept referring to how “clear” things are in the Constitution.

Why, if they are so clear, do people continue to disagree about them? Why, if things are so clear, and attributable to one cause, can’t we as a society simply pull the magic lever and solve our problems? Are we merely arguing over who gets to pull the lever, or when? Or how?

Today, every domestic airline is accused of mismanagement. But not long ago, Pan American Airlines stood alone. Within a relatively short period of time, they bought a bunch of 747s, purchased a major piece of real estate to diversify, and the price of jet fuel went up dramatically. All 3 factors ultimately contributed to its demise. Add a 4th, the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland (which talking heads today would claim they should have foreseen), and you had a recipe for failure. Yep, sounds like mismanagement to us.

What is most troubling about the current political discourse is that our politicians choose, or are forced to explain in simplistic, one dimension terms, or address using simplistic, one dimension approaches, incredibly complex, global systems. Our ability to solve the complex problems of the future will only be hampered through this discourse.

That having been said, are we capable of identifying one umbrella under which we can place the majority of factors leading to our current status? We suspect the Greedy and Lazy umbrella will do just fine, as reflected in our Pigs Get Fat; Hogs Get Slaughtered piece.

We can't help but think that growing up during the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and WWII prepared parents of Baby Boomers to be more self-disciplined.

They, for the most part, were and are financially risk-adverse. No credit default swap derivatives for them. Our 92 yr old will use one paper napkin over and over, wrinkled to the point of non-recognition – to save a few pennies. Another friend’s Mother, a Holocaust survivor, stealthily dilutes all liquid soaps and detergents when she visits, claiming the products are too concentrated, and thus wasteful.

We Baby Boomers, on the other hand, are anything but risk-adverse, and in lots of ways, that’s been a good thing. We lived through a period of incredible, economic growth and dramatic expansion of the Middle Class. However, as Irving Kristol once noted, in the realm of human affairs there are no benefits without costs.

Brian Tracy has a new book out, The Power of Discipline. In it, he has a quote from Harry E. Fosdick, "No steam or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is funneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated and disciplined." The principles are also applicable to individual citizens. We simply got too comfortable, and took our eyes off the big picture.

We do not blame our political leadership in this country for our current state of affairs. We blame the individual citizens for doing it to ourselves. Where we find fault with our elected leaders might be summed up as follows. For political expediency, they want us to believe that the problems are fairly recent, and then suggest that they can be solved by employing one or two simple tactics.

That’s just horse-manure, and all of us know it. Even more troubling is that so many of us bought that snake-oil dogma, and then re-tweeted them. It’s time for us to take personal responsibility for The Disuniting of America.

Here’s hoping that the “better educated” and “more sophisticated” college students, to whom we direct our messages, will not make the same mistakes, and will be far less gullible and irresponsible.