Blog

The other day I received an email from Don Tapscott, promising me a free copy of his latest book Grown Up Digital, to send to a friend or relative for Christmas, if - here’s the catch - I wrote a review of it to post on either Amazon or Indigo. I just checked and there are just two reviews posted on Indigo and one on Amazon, so I understand why he is making this offer. Still, the implicit message is that a good review is expected. So I’ll forego the offer and post an entirely uncompensated review here.

One of the key themes in Tapscott’s work is that the “Net Generation” - people born between 1977 and 1997 - have grown up with readily available information technology; not only have they greater facility with technology than previous generations, but the technology has shaped their consciousness. Tapscott cites eight norms that he claims characterize this group: freedom, customization, a critical stance to institutions (scrutinizing), a desire for corporate integrity and transparency, a desire to mix work and entertainment, collaboration, speed, and innovation. His main message to all and sundry institutions is that, if you are to succeed in your relationship with the Net Generation, you must respect its norms. All this sounds plausible, but is the Net Generation really that different from all others?

Methodologically, the book was based on online surveys of 7700 Net-Geners (aged 13 to 29), along with control groups of 800 Gen Xers (ages 30 to 41), and 800 baby boomers (ages 42 to 61). Obviously, using the control groups was essential, though the surveys should also have been conducted offline, given that smaller proportions of both Gen Xers and boomers than Net Geners are online. As he was writing for popular consumption, it wasn’t a surprise that Tapscott’s main form of evidence was anecdote. He published only a little of his data. And, he claimed (on p. 34) that the eight norms differentiate Net Geners from their parents. As an academic, I’d like to have seen a book that was stronger on data than anecdote. If Tapscott feels that this would have hurt his sales, then he could have found some other way to make the data available, perhaps as a CD packaged with the book, or online.

Chapter 9, which deals with the Net Gen and democracy, interested me most. He argued that Net Geners are looking for personal involvement in democracy that goes beyond the traditional “you vote, we rule.” Barack Obama, the candidate who most acutely realized this and then translated into his online campaign, was clearly the beneficiary of massive support from Net Geners, as Tapscott approvingly observed. The chapter advocates expanding the Net Gen model of interactivity and collaboration in the political realm.

The chapter ends with a set of recommendations based on the eight norms (p.268). Two strike me as particularly dubious.

“If you’re a politician, stop using attack ads” because “Net Geners are sick of vacuous politics … want to know what politicians stand for … [and] want to revitalize the Founding Fathers’ marketplace of ideas.” But two pages before that, Tapscott told us how Net Geners are using YouTube to skewer politicians they dislike or mistrust. Politics, for any generation, is about both advocacy and critique. Net Geners are as willing to criticize as any other generation. My reading is that they are more partial to satirical putdowns than straight-out big lie attacks, and the Obama campaign was better at playing to this sensibility than was the McCain campaign.

The second recommendation was to “forget about putting ‘government online’ … Don’t have ‘web sites’: create communities for new models of service delivery.” I’m not sure if this means governments should drop their websites and go with Facebook, but whatever it exactly means, I’m skeptical. Governments and political campaigns build their own websites to have some control over their own messages and the nature of interactions with their citizens. Again, Obama is instructive. He built his own campaign website, transition website, and, on January 20, www.whitehouse.gov will undoubtedly reflect his approach. It will have much more interaction and scope for user-provided content than any major political site we’ve seen before, but President Obama will still control the central message.

To conclude, one of Tapscott’s key messages is “the kids are all right,” namely that they haven’t been digitally-dumbed-down or otherwise corrupted. I’m with him there, but the digital dawning of the age of Aquarius he heralds seems to me a bit utopian.

This will be my last post of the year. A happy and healthy holiday season and New Year to all!

The coalition did bring change, not necessarily the change that was expected, but an important change nonetheless, stability in the leadership of the Liberal Party. And now that Michael Ignatieff is in place, it’s essential to return to the policy issues that brought the coalition into being, namely the nature of the economic stimulus package and appropriate funding for political parties.

The neo-Keynesian position on economic stimulus - espoused by this year’s Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman, 2001 Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and senior Obama adviser Lawrence Summers - is that monetary stimulus and tax cuts won’t be sufficient to bring the global economy out of this recession. Monetary stimulus isn’t being passed along by the financial intermediaries, which are using the infusions of government money to shore up their own balance sheets. Tax cuts would go mainly into savings, as happened last spring in the US. That leaves fiscal policy to do the job of taking up slack and priming the pump for a private sector recovery.

I suggest three criteria for choosing spending projects: speed, efficiency, and effectiveness. In general, there is a tradeoff between speed and efficiency (spending no more than necessary for a project), but now excess capacity should hold down input costs. Smart procurement policy can create incentives for starting quickly and timely completion. The most important criterion is effectiveness, by which I mean defining great things that we, as a society, can do together.

The problem with entrusting the responsibility for fiscal stimulus to the Harper Government is that it’s just not in their DNA. The Conservatives don’t respect the public sector and have no vision of societal projects; they just want to give money back to taxpayers. Barack Obama’s speech about his stimulus package, delivered on YouTube last Saturday, exemplifies a leader defining a vision and outlining the projects that flow from it. (Notice that one of the projects, connecting all schools and libraries to the Internet is something the Chretien Government did over a decade ago.) By outlining a visionary and vigorous fiscal policy, the Liberals would define themselves as a clear alternative government, ready to contest an election early in the new year. Here are a few areas I’d suggest:

• Energy efficiency and alternative energy
• Enhancing public transit, in particular by implementing road pricing in larger cities
• Improving the delivery of government services
• Education, particularly reskilling, and research
• and that Conservative bête noire Canadian culture.

The Conservative move to terminate public subsidies for political parties, while intended to cripple the Opposition, was justified by citing opinion polls. Likely the question was posed in terms of wasteful government spending. A deliberative polling approach, taking as its objective strengthening Canadian democracy, would produce a different, more supportive result. In discussions about appropriate funding for political parties, participants should be don the philosopher John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” namely they should exclude from their minds their current circumstances or those of the party they support so as to come up with a principled solution that is in the overall best interest of society.

So let’s change the channel from leadership to policy.

In an interview reported in the New York Times last week, George Bush said “I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values.” Did anyone ever write his own political obituary more accurately? At the root of all Bush’s policy failures was his inflexibility and unwillingness to adopt his ideology to changing circumstances.

Stephen Harper, now on the verge of defeat in the House of Commons, often gives the appearance of pragmatism. His government’s economic statement last week, however, shows that, like George Bush, he is the captive of an inflexible ideology. In Harper’s case, there are two idées fixes. The first is his desire to use any tactic possible to destroy the Liberals as a political force. In this case it was the proposal to remove public support for political parties. (Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan has frequently written about the Liberals’ financial woes, and it’s clear that Harper wants to change the rules to drive them deeper into the hole.) Harper’s second idée fixe is the agenda of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution: tax cuts, smaller government, and weaker public service unions. This has been espoused by such old Common Sense Revolutionaries as Chief of Staff Guy Giorno, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, and Transport Minister John Baird. The Harper Government’s economic statement combined the financial knee-capping of the Liberals with the CSR program under the assumption that the Liberals, in the throes of a leadership campaign, would meekly acquiesce rather than face an election.

Harper has miscalculated and a Liberal-NDP coalition, with Bloc Quebecois support, appears ready to defeat the government and take power. While the Government is furiously back-tracking on policy, the issue is no longer policy, but leadership, in particular whether Harper is Canada’s best leader during this economic crisis.

Assuming that the Harper Government is defeated in a non-confidence vote a week from now, there will be some important implications.

First, Canada’s non-partisan public service, in particular Cabinet Secretary Kevin Lynch, should now be working round the clock to formulate a bold economic recovery package, so that if Stephane Dion takes office as Prime Minister as early as next week, it is on his desk as his top priority.

Second, a Liberal-NDP coalition will be ideologically closer to the Obama Democrats than the Harper Government would have been. The challenge for thinkers at Foreign Affairs and International Trade and Industry Canada will be to co-ordinate Canada’s recovery package with that of the US, so that our two countries are not working at cross-purposes or adopting beggar-thy-neighbour policies.

The third implication is political. Whatever happens, the Liberals will retain public funding. It would be useful for them, however, to act as if they lost it. The Liberals’ efforts at broad-based fund-raising are pitiful. This is obvious to me when I contrast the solicitations I receive from the Obama campaign to those I receive from the Liberal Party. The Liberals could learn about fund-raising, particularly online, from both the Obama campaign and successful organizations like Jazz-FM. Here are two suggestions: level with members about the state of the party’s finances and what has to be done to recover. Set out deadlines, goals, and purposes, for example establishing a $2 million fund to pay for national advertising that will respond to the Conservatives’ anticipated attack ads on a new Liberal leader.

As Harold Wilson, a British Prime Minister four decades ago, famously said, “a week is a long time in politics.” Much can happen in the week before the non-confidence vote on December 8. But momentum matters mightily in politics, and the momentum is now on the side establishing a “newer than new” government for Canada.