A Working Model of American Social Innovation

There's a interesting meme making its way around the internet attributed to Aristotle that has sparked some interesting debate:

I think some ideas are, well, just bad ones.  And that you can see them at face value as such.  Others are more, well, complex or nuanced - often requiring a tweak here or there to get right, or needing to me maintained / updated to address changing times and circumstances.  And some ideas are just good ones to be picked up immediately.  Pure observation tells us that the vast majority of them are in the middle category, and that the advantage of having an open mind is that you can experience them, play with them, and then either drop them as bad ideas, change them to make them better, or adopt as good.


Which gets me to dogmatic orthodoxy - the tune of the day in this country with both the liberal and conservative camps having polarized themselves, and requiring strict adherence to a narrowly defined set of values or beliefs.  Through this there is no ability to try things on, no space for trial and error; imagine having to explain why what you thought might have been a workable idea turned out to be unworkable?  Shear heresy to have undertaken it.


So there must be more than one dimension at work here - for there are plenty of highly educated people on both sides of the aisle, and precious few of them seem to be willing to try something interesting to see what might happen.  Let's just call that something "Willingness to Try" or "Orthodoxy"  If we plot these two attributes on a simple two by two matrix let's see what we get:

Figure One

Here we can see the two by two with four resulting quadrants of social innovation.  Moving counter clockwise from the upper right we have:

• Quadrant I - Innovation - a place where new ideas are entertained and the social environment exists to try them out

• Quadrant II - Stagnation - a place where new ideas are entertained, but the polarized orthodoxies of the ruling class prevents society from testing or employing them

• Quadrant III - Stasis - a place where no new ideas are identified, and the polarized orthodoxies of the ruling class prevents society from testing even those mediocre ideas that surface

• Quadrant IV - Stagnation - no new ideas are entertained, but we'd be willing to try them out if they did (a null set of good ideas making it to the table)  - resulting in overall stagnation

A basic premise I'll employ is that of asymptotic distribution as we approach the extremes of either variable considered.  


With this defining principle in mind, to the basic framework outlined in Figure One above we can now add the identifiable frontiers of innovation

Figure Two

In Figure Two we can see the limits of innovation:

• In Quadrant I we can identify the efficient frontier  - beyond which we're trying out too many new ideas with no guiding principles yielding total Chaos
• In Quadrant II we can see that too high a degree of Political Orthodoxy coupled with a Highly Educated mind leads to Gridlock beyond the workable frontier, as no party can agree on what should be done or when
• In Quadrant III we see the reactionary frontier, to me the scariest of them all, which sees us slipping quickly into the Dark Ages
• And finally, Quadrant IV as we approach a total lack of orthodoxy coupled with an unwillingness to entertain new ideas leads to a Chaotic Dark Age.

Building upon Figure Two we can identify a point where we've attained minimum social efficiency in societal innovation.  In Figure Three I plot a hypothetical minimum social efficiency frontier - to the right of which we're entertaining sufficient new ideas to deliver the social innovation required to adapt to our changing environment, to the left of which we're not. 

Figure Three

Thus, any combination of ideas and political orthodoxy which yields a societal innovation profile between the minimum social efficiency line and the efficient frontier arc is at least a productive situation.  Anything beyond the efficient frontier, or to the left of the minimum social efficiency frontier is not.

All that is left is to plot where various parties on the political spectrum are to see what we have from a leadership standpoint.  This enables us to develop a prognosis for America's ability to adapt to our changing times and emerge from the financial and economic issues we face today successfully.

I've plotted a few of the major actors (and a couple of minor ones) Figure Four below - let's see what we get:

Figure Four

Crap.  We're hosed.  Not a single one of them looks like they're going to work for us.

I guess it's time to move to New Zealand.  Either that or find some middle ground in a new set of players that will actually help this country rather than hinder it.