by Gary Griffin
24. It’s very important to understand this philosophical concept of determinism, because it goes directly to understanding beliefs and America’s belief systems in terms of philosophy. As discussed in chapter 4, our philosophical system is built around two main concepts—determinism and free will.
25. I am arguing that since American society is a deterministic, dynamic system that we can know the current and future state of the system if we can determine its initial condition.
26. A thermodynamic system is one major example.
27. Gleick, 1988.
28. Lorenz, 1996.
29. Caplow, 1991.
30. Caplow, 1991, 11.
31. Caplow maintains that Emile Durkheim provides the most sophisticated account of this type of transition in “The Division of Labor in Society” (See page 12).
32. Leading and lagging indicator as used to measure performance based on Norton and Kaplan’s Balanced Scorecard. I suggest here that this type of idea will become more important in achieving higher levels of productivity in human organizations and human work efforts, as we begin to more fully understand what it means for individuals to be the new owners of the means of production in the twenty-first century.
33. As I will discuss more thoroughly in chapter 3, America has seen these types of technological advances with the advent of computing technologies and the Internet. It is this technology that makes the three macro-level trends possible as I have outlined them in chapter 1. With these types of technologies, we have new choices to make. These choices translate into a style of living that defines an information society and a knowledge-based economy. As I will demonstrate in chapter 7, this style of living is the only way we can maintain our standard of living in the United States.
34. See both Volti, 1992, 21-22 and Atkinson, 2004, 180. Both authors use the case of the Luddites to make their points of resistance to change; especially when that change threatens jobs.
35. For illustration purposes, I assume fifty weeks of work per year with two weeks off for vacation time.
36. It would be great to put a date on just when the shovel was first invented. The truth is that no one really knows. How magnificent it must have been to stop digging with your hands and to start digging with a shovel. Simple by today’s standards of technological wonders, at one time is was a monumental breakthrough.
37. The Space Shuttle is part of the Space Transportation Program operated by NASA. The first operational flights were in 1982.
38. To bring about a different and better understanding of social change, I use chaos theory in this chapter and apply it to the human system we call American society.
39. See description in chapter 3 where I describe the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society and then from and industrial society to an information society.
40. Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company is credited with creating the first assembly line in manufacturing between 1908 and 1915, which resulted in the mass production of the Ford Model T at an affordable price for the average American.
41. Belief systems are more fully discussed in chapter 4.
42. Schumpeter, 1976.
43. Schumpeter, 1976, 82.
44. Schumpeter, 1976, 83.
45. I first saw this quote in Atkinson, 2004. It was written by Nicoli Machiavelli in 1515 in The Prince.
46. As I argue in chapters 4-6, freedom of choice is fundamental to the unalienable rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. When these rights are restricted, it threatens the very liberty that defines Americans as free citizens. In our current political situation, those in power use their power to force their will on the rest of the people, thereby restricting our freedom of choice. This is not, and never has been, the classical liberalism envisioned by the founding fathers when they constructed the U.S. Constitution.
47. The division of labor was perfected during industrialization because it was there that the complexity of the work effort required a greater degree of specialization to accomplish the goal, work product, or final output of the system.
48. This is the first indicator that new technology and new ways of doing things had been applied to the old system of production—in this case, it was the basis of agricultural society as a means of subsistence for a vast majority of Americans. Once the nature of work changed and few people were needed, other forms of work had to be devised such as in the case of industrialization. This transition was slow, occurring over many years.
49. Bell, 1999.
50. For example, we couldn’t be where we are today without the first mainframe computer invented by IBM in 1955. The pc revolution began in 1981, the Microsoft windows operating system was introduced in 1990, and ARAPANET became operational in 1983. The Internet became publicly available around 1993 with the creation of a browser called Mosaic; cell phones widely introduced in the early 1990s.
51. See chapter 10 where I discuss education as one of the major areas of concern to be addressed by our government and new social policies to build a new education system.
52. See U.S. Department of Commerce, 1999 and U.S. Department of Commerce, 2002.
53. Max Weber’s theory of lifestyle or style of living is fundamental to the execution of a twenty-first century strategy that will lead the nation toward prosperity.
54. If such theoretical propositions are true, it is impossible to ignore the relationship of style of living to poverty and standard of living.
55. See discussion in chapter 4 around beliefs and belief systems as they are related to philosophical systems.
56. In the Bible, Jesus spoke of the parable of sower and the seeds. Matthew 13:3-9 (KJV) reads:
And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.
57. See note 21 on Immanuel Kant. As I state there, humans use time and space to define reality.
58. I subscribe to the creation story that is a part of Judeo-Christian belief system. I know that there is a God who created everything. I think that evolution is certainly a valid observation of science as made by Charles Darwin— it describes change, and living organisms do change. This whole book is about the evolution of American society, after all. I just can’t subscribe to the notion that man evolved from apes.
59. See Adler, 1978; Adler writes in his book on Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) that no idea he presents is less than 2,400 years old. I specifically single out Aristotle in this chapter because so many of the ideas that are America and American society are a result of the influence of Aristotle and his writing on other people.
60. The Bible in its current form didn’t take place all at once. The canonization of the Bible took place during the third and fourth centuries AD. This would’ve been 700 to 800 years after Aristotle lived.
61. Saint Thomas Aquinas was an Italian priest in the Roman Catholic Church who lived in the thirteenth century. He was a philosopher and theologian whose influence can be seen in the areas of Western ethics, natural law, and political theory. He acted as a modifier and a vehicle of Aristotelian philosophy with the thought of Augustine in his most important work Summa Theologica.
62. Adler, 1978, 187.
63. It is here that we must tackle some of the most difficult questions because this is where Greek philosophy meets theology and the questions of God as a creator and man as his creation. Such questions are fundamental to this chapter and this book because the human condition and issues of poverty and prosperity are directly tied to work and systems of production. Work as a m
eans of subsistence from this perspective is a curse God put on humans when he kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying him. If true, everyone must work.
64. See Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. He was a French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist (1596–1650). During his life he had a profound influence on philosophy and mathematics as the creator of the Cartesian coordinate system and the father of analytical geometry.
65. The mind-body dichotomy is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respects, nonphysical (distinct from the body). In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul.
66. In chapter 3 of Exodus in response to Moses inquiry, God describes himself as “I am.”
67. I take the position that God never endowed human beings with free will as described by Greek philosophy where a human being can act and do without restraint according to his innate will. I argue that God did not give Adam and Eve free will; he gave them freedom of choice. While a fine distinction, perhaps, it nonetheless is distinctly different. The freedom of choice view presumes that actions, that is the choices we make, have consequences. Free will to be truly free would not have consequences associated with actions.
68. The point I wish to make here is that I am not trying to present and argue points of theology per se. However, theology is a major contributor to the American belief system, and therefore issues such as God and whether he exists can’t be ignored when addressing the need to change our philosophical system.
69. Almost all the signers of the Declaration of Independence were professing Christians.
70. Weberin The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
71. I argue that a human being is different from every other living thing because we are not animals. We are beings. To be a human being is a state of being that is expressed through Rene Descartes’ law of “I think, therefore I am.” This state of being is what gives us the creative ability to transform ideas into real things or objects. We create.
72. Division of labor or economic specialization is the specialization of cooperative labor in specific, circumscribed tasks and roles, intended to increase the productivity of labor. Historically the growth of a more and more complex division of labor is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialization processes.
73. As I discuss in chapter 6 on government and political parties, the best way for America to move forward is through a third political party. It would be a good strategy for that party to represent the middle class interests, which could be articulated in language that serves the Independents and significant proportions of both the Democrat and Republican parties. The Democrats and Republicans now focus their political strategies by dividing the voting populace down an imaginary line called the center. The center right is considered Republican. The center left is considered Democrat. This line moves generally based on particular issues at the time of elections, especially economics. I contend that a party representing the broad middle class would be successful in helping the country to move forward, instead of left or right as the two current parties would prefer.
74. See Adler, 1978, 167.
75. See Mills, 2000, 350. Here he describes that Washington relaxed with the Voltaire’s ‘letters’ and Locke’s “On Human Understanding.” He wasn’t the only one reading the popular ideas of the day. Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration also read and was influenced by these ideas, especially those of John Locke. Mills writes that “in the higher political, economic, and military circles, the briefing and the memorandum seem to have pretty well replaced not only the serious book, but the newspaper as well.”
76. Independence Hall Association, 2010.
77. See Habermas, Theory and Practice, 1973, 88.
78. Locke, 2007, section 6.
79. The State of Nature of man is governed by the Laws of Nature established by their Creator.
80. At the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by an anxious bystander, what form of government had been formed. He responded, “A republic if you can keep it.”
81. See chapter 6 for a discussion of how political parties use public opinion to push political agendas.
82. I use the terms Creator and God interchangeably.
83. See chapter 6, where I discuss the history of political parties in the United States.
84. Originally, political economy meant the study of the conditions under which production and consumption within limited parameters was organized in the nation-states. It involved the examination of an economy that was made possible by political structures generally supported by established legal means through social policies.
85. See Mills, 2000, 338.
86. The Prince is a political treatise written by Niccolo Machiavelli in 1513.
87. See Hayek F.A., The Road to Serfdom.
88. See Habermas, Theory and Practice, 1973, 77-78.
89. Atkinson, 2004, 203.
90. The dangers of centralized planning by government are explained well by Fredrick A. Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom. There’s little more I can say to do justice to this great work.
91. The basic idea I used here comes from the Cato Institute Web site in the About Cato section of the site. It was accessed on 04/10/2009.
92. Ibid.
93. It’s impossible to know the exact debt level by 2020. It really depends on how much is spent beyond tax revenues collected. In the twenty-first century, America’s debt has grown from about four trillion in 2000, when George W. Bush took office to about twelve trillion currently. Congress just increased the debt level again to over fourteen trillion. With entitlements that are due to baby boomers over the next decade, thirty-five to fifty trillion isn’t an unrealistic expectation.
94. I’m simply referring to the Troubled Asset and Relief Program (TARP) funds allocated in 2008 through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.
95. Changed attitudes in reaction to the Great Depression were instrumental in the move to the welfare state in many countries, a harbinger of new times where cradle-to-grave services became a reality after the poverty of the depression. During the Great Depression, it was seen as an alternative middle way between communism and capitalism. The party responsible for such social programs is the Democrat Party. As baby boomers retire over the next decade, they will expect to receive the entitlements based on the fact that they will have paid into this system their entire adult working lives. The money to pay them these entitlements in the form of Social Security and Medicare doesn’t exist, and it can’t exist based on the current system.
96. “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” Thomas Jefferson in a 1802 letter to Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury.
97. See Hobbes, 1985. A leviathan is a sea monster. Thomas Hobbes titled his book after the creature in describing the structure of society and legitimate government; the book is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.
98. See Heilbroner, The Wordly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 1999, 14.
99. Ibid., 38.
100. Smith, 2003.
101. Ricardo, 2004.
102. David Ricardo lived from 1772 until 1823. His influential work Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was published in 1817. Karl Marx lived from 1818 until 1883, and his influential work Capital: A Critique of Political Economy wasn’t published until 1867. I use this to illustrate here how ideas are transmitt
ed from one generation to the next, from one person to another.
103. See Heilbroner, The Wordly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 166.
104. Socialism refers to the various theories of economic organization advocating common or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on the amount of labor expended. Most socialists share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through exploitation, creates an unequal society, does not provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximize their potential, and does not utilize technology and resources to their maximum potential nor in the interests of the public.
105. See chapter 6, 124-125.
106. See Heilbroner, The Wordly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 1999, 248-249.
107. See Keynes, 1997. John Maynard Keynes is the father of Keynesian economics, which argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes and therefore advocates active policy responses by the public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle.
108. Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, and behavior of the economy of the entire community, a nation, a region, or the entire world.
109. Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies how households and firms make decisions to allocate limited resources, typically in markets where goods or services are being bought and sold. Microeconomics examines how these decisions and behaviors affect the supply and demand for goods and services, which determines prices, and how prices, in turn, determine the supply and demand of goods and services