The Conversation

Oliver Porter designs and implements partnerships between municipalities and corporations, allowing cities to privatize virtually all of their functions. Since his central role in incorporating Sandy Springs, Georgia in 2005, Oliver his moved on to advising numerous other American and Japanese cities through his consultancy firm PPP Associates and has authored two books, Creating the New City of Sandy Springs and Public/Private Partnerships for Local Governments. Before his work in urban privatization, he was an executive at AT&T.

Our conversation telescopes from micro to macro, beginning with the story of Sandy Springs' incorporation and ending with an extended back-and-forth about the role of government, human nature, and American decline. You'll want to keep Lawrence Torcello's discussion of John Rawls in mind as Oliver and I discuss the biological and social lotteries—which segues into a contrast with Chuck Collins regarding safety nets and opportunity. Happiness and satisfaction come up as well and we discover a resonance between Laura Musikanski's work and Oliver's interest in making government more responsive to the electorate. Finally, we'll revisit the question nagging at James Bamford: what is democracy good for if it chooses to undermine itself? Let's be honest, nobody's going to answer that question more succinctly than Winston Churchill.

Micah and I conclude the episode with a discussion of how Oliver's themes relate to local/central and individual/collective tensions we've seen elsewhere in The Conversation. We'll also touch upon declension narratives, opportunity and historical context, and return (twice) to Mark Mykleby's aphorism that "our assumptions have become our truths."

Col. Mark "Puck" Mykleby is a former marine and co-author (along with Capt. Wayne Porter) of A National Strategic Narrative for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, a document that encouraged broadening the concept of defense to include sustainability. Currently Mark is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute dedicated to questions about the American future. We learned about Mark through our 41st interviewee, John Fullerton.

There are a lot of ideas packed into this episode: America as an organism in a strategic ecology, sustainability as national narrative that succeeds containment, and the broadening of sustainability to include everything from an engaged populace to new metrics for growth. Mark also talks about America's lack of a society-wide conversation about the future and the difference between being a resident and being a citizen.

Topically, there are connections to Laura Musikanski's work at the Happiness Initative, David Korten's new myth, and John Fullerton's financial thinking. You'll also want to ponder the connection between Mark and Lawrence Torcello. Is Classical Liberalism the best path to achieving conversation?

James Bamford is an author and journalist who has written extensively about the National Security Agency. His books include The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory. He has also produced a documentary for NOVA on PBS. We learned about James last year through a Wired article about the NSA's new data center in Bluffdale, Utah.

My conversation with James covers several topics that have been missing from The Conversation thus far: privacy, surveillance, and the threat of totalitarian government. As a result, this episode has few overt connections to the rest of the project, but there are underlying commonalities. From Chuck Collins to David Korten, we have heard thinkers concerned with hyperindividualism in its economic and social manifestations. On the other end of the spectrum, we have David Miller and Robert Zubrin who are worried about the possibility for collective regulation to dampen individual creativity and enterprise. James departs from all of these conversations and examines how the individual/community tension plays out in the realm of security and personal liberty.

Micah, Neil, and I conclude the episode with an attempt to better integrate James into the rest of the project. Somehow, this leads us into a discussion of what government is for and if an apathetic democracy is worth preserving.

John Seager is the President of Population Connection, formerly Zero Population Growth. Since its founding in 1968, Population Connection has been America's largest grassroots organization dedicated to the question of overpopulation. Prior to his work at Population Connection, John worked for the EPA and in congressional politics.

Population has been a regular theme in The Conversation but has not been well developed in previous episodes. John remedies that. He also argues that overpopulation results primarily from gender inequality and a lack of access to affordable contraception—education and affluence matter, but they are secondary to equality. Combatting overpopulation is often thought of in centralized and draconian terms, but John feels that population levels will naturally plateau if individuals are allowed to freely choose the size of their families. Does this make you think of the Constitutional questions discussed in Roberta Francis' episode?

Early in The Conversation, Alexander Rose mentioned his concern that a declining population could threaten our economic system. That question surfaced again, albeit in a slightly different guise, when I spoke to John Fullerton about the challenge of decelerating the economy—though we did not talk about population decline, it's worth asking if our appraisals of corporate value assume a growing population. 

Seager also gives us another perspective on the ideological purity and social pragmatism discussion that Neil and I had at the end of Gary Francione's episode. Like Francione, Seager is a moral realist in certain areas—gender equality being one—but he also embraces incremental change and makes a case for the word "opportunism." Are purity and pragmatism a false binary? Are they equally effective (or ineffective) modes of achieving social goals? Micah, Neil and I will talk about this more at the end of the episode.

One last connection to leave you with: Robert Zubrin. Zubrin claims that overpopulation is a false concept and that, with sufficient freedom and creativity, we can support ever greater populations. Does this make him at odds with Seager? Or does Seager's emphasis on individual freedom and choice make his ideas compatible with Zubrin's? We don't know.

Roberta Francis has been advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment for over thirty years, chairs the ERA Taskforce for the National Council of Women's Organizations and administers equalrightsamendment.org. She has also been active with the New Jersey League of Women Voters.

There's something ridiculous about needing to include the ERA in a project about the future—why didn't we take care of this ninety years ago? If the ERA reminds us of anything, it's that old ideas can remain new and common sense can be remarkably controversial. I will revisit this theme in my upcoming conversation with Scott Douglas of Greater Birmingham Ministries.

Roberta and I talk about what the ERA is, why it failed, and why it's still necessary to a population that, largely, believes it already passed. We conclude by talking about the tension between individual and collective good, the role of government, and compromise. You will hear echos of Peter Warren, Lawrence Torcello and, in the last coda, John Fife.

Gary L. Francione is an animal rights activist, proponent of veganism, Professor of Law and Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers. Previously he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as an attorney in New York, and clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor. He is the author of several books including Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement and, more recently, co-author of The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation.

For all of the talk of biocentrism and anthropocentrism that dominated many of the early episodes of The Conversation, animals have not been a major theme within the project. Chris McKay, Robert Zubrin, and David Keith all discussed animals in passing, but for Gary they are central to a discussion of what he considers the biggest issue of our era: the tension between moral realism and moral relativism. Questions of nonviolence, commodification, and empathy pervade our conversation, but Gary pairs his abstract notions with a lot of concrete examples—this episode deals with the visceral immediacy of everyday life and doesn't threaten to float away in a philosophical balloon. I think you will like this episode, just as I think it will challenge you.

In terms of connections, there are points where Gary could almost be responding directly to Richard Saul Wurman's moral relativism. Lawrence Torcello will be on your mind, not merely because I mention him in the introduction, but because Gary's conversation provokes questions of relativism, pluralism, and how we can work towards the broader good.

On another note, we're adding a new co-host to The Conversation: Neil Prendergast will be joining the project this episode. Micah and I aren't going anywhere but, as Micah's work schedule gets busier, we wanted to bring another voice on board so we can resume our weekly schedule and have two hosts on deck. We're also excited because Neil brings a fresh sensibility and body of knowledge to our concluding discussions. This will be fun.

John Fullerton is the founder of the Capital Institute, a group dedicated to the modest task of rethinking the future of finance. Prior to his work at the Capital Institute, he was the Managing Director of JPMorgan.

If there is a moment that encapsulates my conversation with John, it is when he suggests we need a new word to express the interconnected environmental/economic system. Applying an investor's sense of risk management to climate change, John sees our economic status quo as reckless and self-destructive. If we remain transfixed by our model of infinite growth in a finite system, John warns, we are likely to destabilize the natural capital underpinning our economy.

If you're hoping John will swoop in with an easy solution here, you're wrong. Transitioning away from an economy based on infinite growth is immensely risky in its own right. Efforts to stabilize the climate would come at the cost of leaving immensely valuable natural resources in the ground, devaluing many of our most important companies, and causing economic havoc.

This yields a choice which, John concludes, isn't a choice at all: economic turbulence with a radically altered climate or economic turbulence without a radically altered climate.

As The Conversation grows larger and connections multiply, it is becoming harder for me to choose which connections to highlight. Here are a few that I haven't linked back to recently: John is skeptical of the technological/market optimism voiced (however cautiously) by Colin Camerer. At the same time, his association of life with goodness takes us back to Chris McKay. Without any prompting by me, he cites the precautionary principle in a way that supports Carolyn Raffensperger and questions Max More.

Mary Mattingly is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. We learned about her through the Flockhouse Project and traced back to discover the Waterpod and her earlier work. Mary’s art explores the environment, sustainability, housing, and community structure, among other things. We have spoken to a fair number of environmental thinkers in The Conversation, but Mary is the first whose work directly explores individual survival in an unstable world.

There are lots of reasons you’ll like this episode. Aside from the Mad Max/Waterworld quality of our conversation, Mary looks at environmental change in a way that is totally unlike anyone else in the project. Thinkers like Tim Cannon, David Miller, and Robert Zubrin have viewed anthropogenic environmental change as morally relative and potentially positive while others, like John Zerzan, Jan Lundberg, and Wes Jackson, describe it as a crisis to be averted. Mary is somewhere in between, admitting that a future in which humans exert great control over the environment could be dark, yet embraceable. Does this put her in a camp with Tim Morton?

Also, the maker economy shows up in Mary’s conversation and connects her to Alexa Clay and Douglas Rushkoff though, in Mary’s vision of the future, the maker spirit is more of a life-and-death necessity than an economic statement. Her interest in resilience may remind you of the end of Chuck Collins’ conversation, too.

There’s a lot more to talk about. Specifically, we’re interested in the coexistence of individualism and communitarianism. Are they in tension or in balance? Micah and I discuss.

Richard Saul Wurman is a designer, author of over 80 books, and founder of several conferences including TED, WWW, and EG. Presently, he is working on Prophesy2025, a conference about the near future. 

Richard caught our attention because he is both an architect and connoisseur of conversation. Because of this, we spoke entirely about conversation itself: its forms, rituals, and value. We also spoke about broader conversation and the hypothesis underlying this project.

This episode is very different from its predecessors. It does not contain a prescriptive vision of the future, definitions of the broader good, or an exploration of a new phenomenon. It also lacks explicit connections to other interviewees, though you will hear implicit connections and think about Lawrence Torcello more than once.

Given these differences, you may wonder why Micah and I chose to include Richard's interview in a project about society-wide conversations and the future. We have two reasons. First, Richard has thought about the details of conversation more than most of us and he provides a useful lens to examine our interviewees and the roles that Micah and I play in The Conversation (apologies for going meta). Second, while broader conversations may exist, Richard has no interest in creating or guiding them. He seeks interesting days for himself and is, generally speaking, a relativist.

We think relativism is an important idea to address.

Relativism questions the very concept of good and critiques the efforts of every participant in this series, regardless of their agendas. It also challenges The Conversation as a project and presses us to explain why we cling to our naive belief that there is something greater than solipsism and our own pleasure. This is a good challenge. This is why we're posting Richard's conversation.

Alexa Clay is an author, economic historian, and director of thought leadership at Ashoka Changemakers. She is co-author of The Misfit Economy, a forthcoming book that looks for economic innovation in the black and gray markets of pirates, hackers, and urban gangs, among others.

We begin by talking about economics in the 17th and 18th centuries and its close bonds with philosophy and psychology. From there we trace the increasing abstraction of economics into a formalized, quasi-scientific discipline that has become indecipherable to most people affected by it.  This leads to a discussion of agency and other types of economies that have sprung up on the fringes of our global economy.  Can these "misfit economies" offer a substantive critique of our current economic system?  Do they offer better systems or address the problems of endless growth highlighted by Wes Jackson, Jan Lundberg, and David Korten?  Alexa and I talk about these questions in the body of the episode while Micah and I will return to them in our conclusion.

Alexa's conversation has a wealth of interesting connections.  Editing has left a few on the cutting room floor, but many remain: Douglas Rushkoff and quantification, Colin Camerer and neuroeconomics, Lawrence Torcello and the philosophy of John Rawls.  There are far more implicit connections, of which Micah and I talk about Gabriel Stempinski and the sharing economy and Laura Musikanski's Happiness Initiative.