I got some press in Canada

For those who are interested, a number of Canadian newspapers picked up my work on the future applications of social media and community mapping in law enforcement.

The Political Dynamics of Foresight

Futurists have long advocated the use of foresight methods among governments and leaders.  The argument for foresight is generally that those who have thought about the future, identified emerging challenges and opportunities, and considered a range of plausible scenarios will likely perform better no matter what the future brings.  However, what this argument fails to mention is that the results of any foresight activity are likely to have winners and losers.

The Europeans are on to something…

A recent report by ICT Results (associated with the European Information Society and Media Directorate-General) begins as follows:

“From a global perspective, most Europeans have little to complain about in life.

Green shadows in France: The burqa ban

The obvious answer to Time magazine’s question, Is French Secularism Anti-Islam? is yes.  Given the number of women who actually wear body-covering burqas (the highest number I’ve seen is 2000), there is clearly something else behind the fierce antagonism many French now show toward the traditions of Muslim immigrants.

Not another Plessy v. Ferguson

Countries with well-developed rule-of-law cultures often have a myth that justice is blind – that judicial decisions are made based on fact, not based on personal values or beliefs.  However, this view does not account for the massive shifts in legal interpretation that have occurred over time as social values have evolved.  In particular, in 1896 seven U.S. Supreme Court justices decided in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was permissible so long as it met the standard of “separate but equal.”  This standard was, of course, overruled in 1954 in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

The obvious relationship between judicial outcomes and the personal beliefs of the judges can – or should, anyway – make life very difficult for judges. 

Scanning the Future of Law Enforcement

For those with $3 burning a hole in their pocket, I wrote an article for The Futurist on the future of law enforcement which is available for sale on their website.

The Future of Microfinance Impact Assessment

On July 4, 2010, I had the honor and privilege of presenting a paper on the future of microfinance impact assessment to an audience in Glasgow, UK that included Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank.  The paper presents three mindsets that exist on a continuum of increasing complexity.  Each of these mindsets has its uses, but in conducting impact assessments of development programs it is important to ensure that the assessment is at least as complex as the impact it seeks to measure.

Congress, Don’t Ask an Economist to Do a Futurist’s Job

Keynes wrote that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed the world is ruled by little else.”  So it seems.  Economic analysis is at the center of most policy debates, and a new legislative initiative can live or die based on the output of an economic model run by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) or the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).  Thus, policy makers and others have responded to the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession in large part by criticizing the economists who seemingly got us into this situation in the first place.

The latest episode of this phenomenon is a July 20 hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight entitled, “Building a Science of Economics for the Real World.” 

Four questions for me

Click here for an interview to promote my speech at the annual conference of the Council of Communication Management.

How old should the Supreme Court be?

I made a parenthetic comment in an earlier post that mainstream discussions, such as those that take place around Supreme Court nominations, consistently neglect the insight that people change qualitatively over the course of their lives.  This blog post describes how that process has turned Associate Justice John Paul Stevens into a fine justice.  Which got me to thinking: It seems that one of the consequences of the culture wars is that Supreme Court nominees have gotten younger.