A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” as Paul Romer, Stanford economist, once said . Sadly, we may be wasting this one. 

To take just one data point, under the best likely scenario, it may take 5 years to get employment back to pre-crash levels.

Graph

To take another data point, consider the table and then ask whether we should extend unemployment benefits:

Graph

There should be no doubt that this is a crisis, no matter what you want to call it - “Great Recession”, “Great Reset”, or “Second Great Depression”. Our hair should be on fire, as UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has noted, yet it is odd how quiet things seem.  Aside from the Tea Party cacophony, there don’t seem to be the expected visible signs of panic.

This leads me to wonder, where will employment growth come from, and how will the nonprofit sector affect, and be affected by, these trends?

The Information Age Goes Old School

“But it’s really an information ocean, not a highway.  If you think of it as an ocean, then you have to consider the kind of tools that are used, who builds the boats, who designs them, and whether you’re surfing or diving.  If you have a message in the bottle, how do you get the bottle to the people who need it?”    Peter Gabriel, (New York Times,  July 13, 1994 )

Many of us have come to expect uninterrupted access to the Internet everywhere. For too many of us, round-the-clock checking of email, Twitter and Facebook have become an unhealthy obsession, and increasingly, an intrusive expectation of employers and co-workers. For the connected, the challenge is now how to unplug, to avoid being overwhelmed by the fire hose. As Nicholas Carr recently observed, reflecting on what seems to be growing revulsion to this “Disconnection is the new counterculture.”

Internet access by now is so ubiquitous that even the poor can connect - the “digital divide” is so 1990s, right?

Unfortunately, no.  As Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas wrote in a recent op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, 65% of households with income below $25,000 do not have access to high-speed broadband connections, according to the Social Science Research Council. In Ubiñas’s view, making broadband access widely available to the huge number of low income people not yet connected, and keeping the Internet open and neutral, are essential challenges to our democracy.  He went on to invite all foundations to join the Ford Foundation, which has committed $50 million over five years to the cause, to address these challenges.

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The Right Measures

By Peter Manzo
Stanford Social Innovation Review

I still remember the embarrassed silence that followed when a colleague, over a decade ago, stood up in a room full of foundation leaders at a Council on Foundations conference and asked “What if we all committed to one common goal – to end child poverty in the U.S. in ten years?”  People reacted as if she had made a rude noise.  It was awkward, but beautiful too.  Her question evoked the possibility of collective progress to a vital goal, and at the same time, it indicted everyone in the room, called our commitment and judgment into question.

Our sector is obsessed with the search for measurable impact in specific initiatives, but, as that story illustrates, resists calls to commit to such clear, measurable objectives like eradicating child poverty. 

The American Human Development Index is an important tool, new to the U.S., that could help us resolve that tension

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