Very early signs of ecomigration

A rising tide may lift the boats but it may also cause people to relocate. Rising sea levels and storms brought on by global warming may lead people to move to higher ground, greener pastures or interior regions. The Washington Post (23 February 2009) calls them ecomigrants. The article cites two examples:

• Adam Fier, of Montgomery County, Md., has moved his family to New Zealand, where he likes the green policies and feels safe from conflict.
• The president of Kiribati, a Pacific nation of low-lying islands, is exploring ways to move all 100,000

  

  Channel between two Kiribati islands

  citizens to a new homeland because of fears that a steadily rising ocean will make the islands uninhabitable. He called for an international fund to buy land for such mass migrations.

The article also hints that people in hurricane-prone areas (such as Louisiana and Florida) are thinking of moving elsewhere.

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Related: 2080: Global warming leads to floods, droughts, agricultural disasters, hunger
Twitter: RT @mitchbetts Ecomigration: People worried about global warming (rising seas) are moving to higher ground. http://bit.ly/12HwSV

Innovative government: Oxymoron or something to cultivate?

Innovation is often viewed as the province of the private sector, but the current economic climate and other big challenges such as terrorism, energy policy and health care mean that government will need to become more innovative to tackle those challenges.

That’s the message of “Innovation State,” an article by Bill Eggers & Shalabh Kumar Singh in the Deloitte Review, Winter 2009.

Already there are pockets of government innovation, including the  “311” citizen complaint hotlines that started in Baltimore. (Call the number and you get the relevant agency person within 10 seconds.) But the innovation efforts are sporadic, piecemeal and easily torpedoed by entrenched stakeholders. The authors say widespread government innovation will require the following steps:

• Cultivate new ideas by engaging employees. For example, the U.S. Transportation Security Agency’s “Idea Factory” is a secure intranet that allows employees to submit ideas for improving agency operations and processes. Employees have submitted some 4,500 ideas — and 20 have been implemented.
• Replicate the great ideas from other federal and state agencies — customizing them to meet local needs. The Texas Performance Review “has saved the state billions of dollars over the years by searching far and wide for innovations that can be applied to Texas government.”
• Establish partnerships among government agencies and between government, private industry, universities and nonprofits to generate new resources and new ideas. “When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to transform the city’s under-performing public school system, he used partnerships to launch innovative pilot programs and sidestep organizational logjams.”

My view: The biggest challenge of all will be creating a “culture of innovation” inside the bureaucracy. It’s not certain that this is even possible (bureaucracy and innovation do seem mutually exclusive). But the nation’s challenges are so great that we’ll need to try. As the article concludes: “This will be difficult, and government will not likely acquire a reputation for innovation next month or even next year. Someday, however, innovative government may roll off the tongue naturally.”

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Twitter: RT @mitchbetts Can government be innovative? May be an oxymoron, but we need to try. Big challenges require innovative approaches. http://bit.ly/wwL9F

The next 100 years in geopolitical affairs

George Friedman — founder & CEO of the geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor — has a new book coming out Jan. 27: “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.” Now Friedman acknowledges that forecasting 100 years into the future may seem audacious, “but, as I hope you will see, it is a rational, feasible process, and it is hardly frivolous.”

“In this book, I am trying to transmit a sense of the future. I will, of course, get many details wrong. But the goal is to identify the major tendencies — geopolitical, technological, demographic, cultural, military — in their broadest sense, and to define the major events that might take place.”

I stumbled across this news at “John Mauldin’s Outside the Box” blog. Maudlin hints that the book can be hard to believe in places, but ultimately he calls it fascinating and thought-provoking.  “George’s strength is his ability to take geopolitical patterns and use them to forecast future events, sometimes with startling and counter-intuitive results,” Maudlin says.

For example, Maudlin notes that Friedman’s book forecasts the following:

• By the middle of this century, Poland and Turkey will be major international players
• Russia will be a regional power — after emerging from a second cold war
• Space-based solar power will completely change the global energy dynamic
• The border areas between the U.S. and Mexico are going to be in play again
• Shrinking labor pools will cause countries to compete for immigrants rather than fighting to keep them out

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Related: Anticipating wild cards in world affairs
Twitter: RT @mitchbetts Preview of George Friedman’s new book “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.” http://bit.ly/c8QX

OK, the 401(k) retirement system didn’t work. What’s next?

For years the conventional wisdom has been to plow money into 401(k) plans for retirement. Anyone who didn’t was considered a financial dunce. Well, so much for conventional wisdom. The 401(k) system has “serious shortcomings,” says The Wall Street Journal (“Big slide in 401(k)s spurs calls for change,” 8 January 2009). Employees have seen their retirement accounts drop, 20%, 30%, 44% in the economic downturn.

“This is the biggest test that the 401(k) plan has seen to date, and it has failed,” says Robyn Credico, head of defined-contribution consulting at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, noting that many baby boomers are ready to retire. “We’ve put people close to retirement in a very challenging position.”

The timing couldn’t have been worse.

[E]ven when workers make good choices, a market meltdown near the end of their working careers can still blow their savings to smithereens.

“That seems like such a fundamental flaw,” says Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. “It’s so crazy to have a system where people can lose half their assets right before they retire.”

The U.S. Congress is beginning to take a look at retirement and 401(k) policy, starting with an October 2008 committee hearing with a variety of witnesses.

Some proposed setting up “universal” retirement accounts, which would cover all workers. One such plan called for establishing accounts that would receive annual contributions from the federal government, and would offer a guaranteed, but relatively low, rate of return. Another proposed automatically investing contributions in an index fund that holds stocks and bonds, with the mix getting more conservative as workers approach retirement.

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, recently issued the following principles for future 401(k) reform:

• Expose excess fees that Wall Street middlemen take from workers accounts.
• Bring young and low-wage workers into the system at a higher rate through automatic enrollment for employers already offering 401(k)s.
• Ensure that retirement accounts have diversified investment options with low fees, including low-cost index funds.
• Ensure workers have access to reliable independent investment advice.
• Reduce vesting periods and improve portability of 401(k) accounts.

But is this just minor tinkering with a system still dependent upon the wildly fluctuating stock market (not much different from gambling)? Do we need more radical reform that provides a solid financial foundation for retirement?

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Related:

• Are Retirement Savings Too Exposed to Market Risk?
• The failure of our 401(k)s
• Deloitte white paper, 2007: Future of 401(k)s (.pdf)

For Twitter: RT @mitchbetts “OK, the 401(k) retirement system didn’t work. What’s next?” http://tinyurl.com/7mp2j5

Future shocks: Killer robots, hyperaging, space tourism, intelligent cars, resource wars

The Washington Post Outlook section (4 January 2009) is full of articles under the label “future shocks.” A sampling:

The world won’t be aging gracefully. “For the world’s wealthy nations, the 2020s are set to be a decade of hyperaging and population decline. Many countries will experience fiscal crisis, economic stagnation and ugly political battles over entitlements and immigration. Meanwhile, poor countries will be buffeted by their own demographic storms. Some will be overwhelmed by massive age waves that they can’t afford, while others will be whipsawed by new explosions of youth whose aspirations they cannot satisfy. The risk of social and political upheaval and military aggression will grow throughout the developing world — even as the developed world’s capacity to deal with these threats weakens. The rich countries have been aging for decades, due to falling birthrates and rising life spans. But in the 2020s, this aging will get an extra kick as large postwar baby boom generations move into retirement.” — Neil Howe and Richard Jackson are researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-authors of “The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century.”

Coming to the battlefield: Stone-cold robot killers. “Armed robots will all be snipers. Stone-cold killers, every one of them. They will aim with inhuman precision and fire without human hesitation. They will not need bonuses to enlist or housing for their families or expensive training ranges or retirement payments.” — John Pike is the director of the military information Web site GlobalSecurity.org.

The next big things:

• Space tourism in 2012 (+/- 2 years) >>>>

  

  Spaceship for space tourism

• Intelligent cars in 2014 (+/- 4 years)
• Telemedicine in 2015 (+/- 4 years)
• Thought power (brain signals controlling systems) in 2020 (+/- 9 years)
• Artificial intelligence in 2021 (+/- 7 years)
• Smart robots in 2022 (+/- 7 years)
• Alternative energy in 2022 (+/- 9 years)
• Cancer cure in 2024 (+/- 8 years)

— William E. Halal, president of TechCast LLC

Global warming could lead to warfare over scarce resources (e.g., arable land and fresh water); mass migrations; and territorial disputes over newly available energy resources (e.g. Arctic oil). — James R. Lee runs American University’s Inventory of Conflict and Environment project. He’s at work on a book on climate change and conflict.

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Related:

• Stanford researchers trying to develop robot like the Jetson’s Rosie
• 2080: Global warming leads to floods, droughts, agricultural disasters, hunger