Archives for June 2011

It’s not difficult to know where power lies in a society. Just watch where the money accumulates. As the United States grew in the 19th century, the money was in New York City and the other major centers of commerce and industry. The Industrial Revolution was creating wealth like nothing that had ever been seen, and it was reflected in the places where the ideas originated and the work was being done.

As the country grew westward, there were pockets of opportunity and money created wherever people were doing interesting and exciting things to create something new. The Midwest became a center for agriculture and various types of industry. Bigger cities in the South started growing, including here in Birmingham, where it was called “the Pittsburgh of the South” because of it being a major center of steel production. California became home to the wealth of the new and growing entertainment industry. And Silicon Valley eventually boomed when it became the center of the high-tech world.

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I’ve been thinking a lot in the last six months about children. I don’t mean in the political sense of “Let’s do it for the children,” but in the real-world sense of what it means to raise happy and emotionally healthy children who can be entrusted with the future of the human race.

It was one simple idea that started me down this trail, but it’s led to places I didn’t expect. I was listening to a historian talk about the recent world financial crisis. He made a simple off-hand remark that companies such as banks are run with an eye on the next quarter of the year when they ought to be run with an eye on the next thousand years. He moved along to various other points, but I’m not sure I heard anything after that.

I was captivated by the question of how I would live the rest of my life if my eye were on 3011 instead of 2011. What plans would I make if I were making a plan for what my family might achieve over hundreds of years instead of what I might personally achieve over a life of mere decades?

This thought experiment led me to consider what would be necessary to build a family that had long-term objectives and values that some of them would choose to pursue. It was such a revolutionary thought that it changed everything about the way I plan things. I’m not so worried now about what I can achieve in my own life. I’m much more concerned with the question of how I can lay a foundation for future generations to build on. Suddenly, it feels less as though it’s about achieving things for my own ego and much more about leaving something that can have a chance of helping to change the world for the better.

If you’re thinking in terms of future generations building on a foundation, it suddenly becomes even more important what kind of offspring you have and how you raise them. Over the past six weeks or so, I’ve written a lot about changes I see coming in the world and how we can seize opportunities to change the world in a post-statist era. But right now, I just want to talk about the matter of children.

Three things have really focused my attention even further on what it means to raise the right kind of children. I could point to a number of different influences, but I’m going to specifically mention three things that weigh on my thoughts today and have led to me thinking about the issue heavily all weekend.

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I roll my eyes at most charges of media bias. I used to be a journalist, so I recognize that a lot of complaints about bias and unfairness simply boil down to people not liking it that reporters don’t tell stories from whatever point of view they happen to agree with. But every now and then, serious examples of unfair journalism jump out at me.

Michael Strong sent me a story Friday in which the public radio show Marketplace talked about the idea of free economic zones existing inside countries that have draconian rules otherwise. (I’ve talked before about developments leading toward free cities, so take a look here, here and here if you haven’t seen them.) It was nice to see the idea of free economic zones at least be mentioned in a news story — because it’s frequently ignored — but I want to point out two things. Once you’ve read the story, tell me which parts stand out starkly as not fitting the rest.

First, there’s the headline, which isn’t supported in the story at all: “Separate and unequal economies in the Arab world.” Unless you live under a rock, it’s very, very clear what the headline writer is trying to imply. He’s trying to invoke the Jim Crow world of “separate but equal” when it comes to schools and public facilities in the United States. Although the story has nothing to do with that — and it’s a very dishonest characterization of the situation — the headline writer has clearly decided to express his disapproval by disdainfully making it clear that what’s going on is just as wrong as forcing black Americans to drink from different water fountains.

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