New Ways of Thinking Are Essential in a New World
Every dimension of the Western World is changing – personal, societal, technological, political, economic, and geopolitical. Although we know there will be another recession, the discussion in Chapter 22, “The Post–Thatcher/Reagan Economy, 2008–09,” sets out the post-2008 economic forces that stand to make the US and global economies different from what they were post-1945. It refers to an increasing number of books, primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom, that are looking at what is going on with fresh analytical eyes – much more so than I am aware of in Canada. It is beyond the scope of this book to explore the full range of what has recently been written. However, I discussed a few of these ideas in a talk at Trent University at the end of 2017 – and I repeat part of it here.
Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker staff writer who grew up in Montreal, had a long article in the magazine, May 15, 2017, titled “We could have been Canada. Was the American Revolution such a good idea?” His opening paragraph read:
And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America – what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior – less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada. (Actually, you could not have been Canada, because Americans are not Canadians. They could not have thought that way, so the outcome could never have been politically achievable – then or now).
The Gopnik rumination about the founding of the United States is important. “Birth myths” are often too limiting and lead to lasting self-misunderstanding and self-limitation. A recent book from Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (2017), suggests that what is happening today in the United States – this strange, post-truth, “fake news” moment – is not entirely new. Rather, it is the ultimate expression of a key part of America’s national character and path. Andersen sees a United States formed by wishful dreamers – by hucksters and their suckers. He sees the “whatever-you-want” fantasy as deeply embedded in the American DNA. A world in which it is fake news, not reality, that gets in the way of what you want.
Identity and culture are the new driving forces of the twenty-first century. Canada has the strength of being able to live without a firm identity in a world when all identities are incomplete. It has a vast land that it can call home and still include a diversity of newcomers.
Leadership greatness in business and politics requires a rare combination of objectivity and empathy. My oldest friend – we were sometimes in the same baby carriage together in Montreal – became a leading child psychotherapist pioneer at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He had that combination. So did Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
I was very interested to read that after four years into the job, the new head of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, in his book, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (2017), put the need for empathy at the centre of his Microsoft reawakening challenge. Empathy is not just basic to his personal philosophy; it is what is working for him as he seemingly takes Microsoft successfully down its needed new path. Empathy from a hi-tech guy – an Indian-born engineer heading one of America’s greatest technology companies – may be telling us something about how needed US movement beyond its current turmoil might take place. I have said the Western world has become unbalanced as the more dominant horizontal Western forces of freedom and science have prevailed. Empathy is a key element in making mutual accommodation work.
A second book that is hopeful for America’s future is Principles: Life & Work (2017) by Ray Dalio. He is the founder and co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates, now the largest and best-performing hedge fund in the world with about $150 billion in global investments. Dalio would probably not realize that his radical transparency believability weighting and idea meritocracy, integrated into algorithms for decision-making, is a specific and highly successful methodology for mutual accommodation decision-making. This one liner does not begin to capture what it takes to use people and algorithms to accommodate everything each has to offer in order to make superbly successful investments. It’s necessary to read the whole book to see how much goes into that success.
There is not much immediate visible empathy at Bridgewater – the ability to start from where the other guy is, until you better understand what is really going on. Markets are a huge and largely effective but imperfect mutual accommodation way. Finance markets are for investors the other guy who must be listened to. Algorithms provide the base data to which disciplined ways of individual thinking are then applied to get to a decision.
Empathy is about listening in an objective way. I see the Dalio/Bridgewater approach as a superb way of hearing what you need to hear before you invest. Investments are not about being empathetic. Financial markets capture where other investors are at a particular point in time. The best objective understanding in the Dalio world involves data and people-weighted belief. The challenge is finding out how to accommodate everything relevant – data and the best thinking – to future market outcomes. The method is to combine data with rules about how to get the best thinking out of the best people – a difficult mutual accommodation to achieve. It has proven itself as a successful way to invest in a tough world, but it can be hard on the participants.
I could mention many more of these kinds of books. They are likely only the beginning of a steady stream, and we should all be on the lookout for them. It is challenging to read Gopnik’s suggestion that the United States was itself fundamentally misconceived. Even if it was, it remains one of the great countries of history, despite the number of significant things it has got wrong. New ideas will be needed for every aspect of American life – as they will for other Western countries too. Trump has disrupted American political life with his egocentric and bullying grasp of the world. The extreme left of the Democratic Party, by tackling “big ideas,” are talking about another round of huge disruptions. After so much Trump disruption, this tack may not be what the American voters want or what the country needs.
Drawn from a speech given at the symposium The Canadian Difference: Dialogues in Diversity, Trent University, December 9, 2017.