The Aspen Ideas Festival: Fifteen Propositions In No Particular Order.

By Karen

I recently attended a pop-up live session of the Aspen Ideas Festival. It was like attending a series of college seminars in quick succession—albeit in a cold and drafty tent. (Probably that was what college was like this past year.) The speakers were knowledgeable and articulate, advancing novel insights in a provocative manner. To some degree, they were also unnerving—several, commenting independently about different spheres of activity, described us as being the frog in water that is now approaching the boiling point. Uh oh. Not as much science as usual, but I still broadened my horizons.

These points particularly struck me.

National Policies.

• Policies supporting national military and civilian service for young people for a year after high school or college would be a critical step toward healing national divisions. (Three days ago an op-ed in the New York Times echoed the same thought. ) This is at the top of my list because it is one of Lustre’s key themes. (Lustre’s view, oddly overlooked at Aspen: national service would be even more effective if we were to make retired people part of the mix.)

• One of the most destructive elements of our political system is elections. We spend vast sums for very little, and politicians engage in constant fundraising to keep their jobs rather than focusing on what their constituents need. Perhaps for that reason, Americans are far less satisfied with their elected officials than are people in other democratic countries. The proposed solution: groups of randomly selected citizens serving for one year terms in lieu of politicians. Not sure about that but pretty sure we would not miss the endless campaigns.

• U.S. defensive cyber security needs an upgrade. (The latest ransomware attack started soon after this talk.) Private companies should fear criminals, not state actors. These criminals know all about their corporate target’s assets, including insurance. Many companies will be forced to pay, but payment supports and enlarges the criminal enterprise.

COVID Lessons.

• COVID has given everyone on earth an unexpected gift by forcing us all to regard our lives from the outside, looking in. Now that lockdowns are ending, we are in a position to act like anthropologists—we can evaluate how we live with unanticipated objectivity. (And who knew Gillian Tett was an anthropologist?)

• We all need to be risk literate—to really understand risks and their relative weights. Decisions made in the face of COVID were not always risk literate and sometimes resulted in worse outcomes.

• COVID has taught that governments must together establish global circuitry designed to handle the next crisis—whether it is biological or nuclear or climate or a Martian invasion. The world needs a mechanism through which relevant experts around the world can rapidly be identified and deployed in effective global teams.

• Public and private actors, including health managers, need to have data scientists as part of any team.

Scientific Advances.

• Dire but short term trauma, like a rape, seems to take over the entirety of a person’s life. Some scientists now believe that such events overwhelm because they have an epigenetic effect. Psychedelics—as part of a course of therapy--may reverse such epigenetic effects. Fascinating. (Psychedelics were outlawed after the tripping ‘60s, but they are likely soon to be licensed for therapeutic use.)

Society and Inequality.

• Productivity has been slowing for 20 years, and income inequality sharply worsened after 1979. Both are a result of policy choices. Health inequities and costs, lack of assets and wealth, and unequal employment opportunities are converging to widen disparities between Black and brown people and white people.

• Black and brown children will become the majority of Americans in the near future. Their access to quality education is determined by zip code, and educational disparity is also increasing. Investment in the future requires that these trends be reversed.

• Some big investment companies who have heretofore focused solely on the wealthy are exploring how they might enter into retail strategies to create investment opportunities as a tool to combat income inequality. Smart idea.

• Corporate America has undergone a social sea change as companies realize they are players on a world stage who must respond to critical events. For example, no corporation commented on Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, and many corporations spoke out about the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter in 2020.

Innovation.

• Innovation has unpredictable cadences. Who would have imagined that we would put a person on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. 

• The web has evolved as it has because large companies took control and determined how to profit. A new idea is in formation, in which people control their own data. Check out Project Liberty and Web 3.0. (No, I do not fully understand either but the internet could use a restructuring.)

• 5G will change our lives by connecting infrastructure (the IoT), processing masses of date, and implementing artificial intelligence and virtual reality. (Will city streets be a combination of real real and virtual real? Will that be fun? Or is it too much for our brains?)

Exciting stuff. Now we need to make things happen.